


End of the Line

by ChocolateEclar



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fantasy, Magic, Post - Midnight Mayor, Resurrection, Urban Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-21
Updated: 2011-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-14 22:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocolateEclar/pseuds/ChocolateEclar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Nothing ever seems to begin gradually for us. It's wham-bam, thanking you kindly, but you are about to have a hell of a time. No warning. No how-do-you-do's." In which a sorcerer is simply minding his own business and a resurrection ruins his day. Again. (AU with the release of book 3, The Neon Court.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude:  The Neon Court

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this pretty much since I finished _The Midnight Mayor_ and I finally decided that perhaps I should be done with it since _The Neon Court_ , book 3, is coming out. Please enjoy.
> 
>  **EDIT: As the UK edition of book 3, The Neon Court, is now out and, as I live in the US, I won't get to read it for almost 2 months, please don't tell me about it. Thanks. (However, once I read it, feel free to talk to me about it.)**

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a warning is issued and ignored and even icy silences cannot ruin one's appetite for blueberry scones.

Nothing ever seems to begin gradually for us. It's wham-bam, thanking you kindly, but you are about to have a hell of a time. No warning. No how-do-you-do's.

One moment, we were walking down the pavement and licking sweet sticky soy sauce off of our fingers from an egg roll and then we stumbled into a big man in an expensive black suit.

I thought perhaps he was an Alderman, but no, he had more of a sense of humour than one normally found in them. He grinned down at me and said, "The Lady wants to see you, milord."

He was impossibly wide and had the kind of steroid-induced bulk in the shoulders that made me step back instinctively. "I suspect you're looking for a different – " I said.

"You be blue electric angels. The telephone interference that is called the Midnight Mayor?" He sounded bored. It offended us just a little.

We had learned that denial rarely worked. I held up my scarred hand. "Guilty, but who – "

"The Lady of the Buzzing Light in the Night-time, the Woman of the Light that Switches on at Dusk, the – "

"Lady Neon?" I asked tiredly.

He nodded his big block of a head and I sighed. "I suppose I don't have a choice."

"Nah."

He took me by the shoulder and dragged me towards the darkened pub across the road. The neon sign flickered into life, illuminating only partial words. Even the Neon Court wasn't immune from the curse of all such signs. In fact, they delighted in leaving messages in half-burnt-out signs.

I was pushed through the front door into the darkness of a space that smelled of gin and whiskey and smoke and buzzed with electricity. Even at five in the afternoon, the court was preparing for nightly excitement.

One shimmery girl parted from the rest of the flutter and twist of bodies and stepped up to me. "Hullo," she shouted over the pounding music. "The Lady herself ain't actually 'ere, but she tol' me to tell you to tell your la'y friend to buzz off like." She swept a hand through her hair – a mass of wires of every colour – and smiled. "I'm Neena, by the 'ay."

"Lady friend?" I repeated. "Penny?" If my apprentice was playing around with the Neon Court, then there was going to be hell to pay.

"Not that one," she said and leaned so close I could feel the static on her skin. Our electric blueness reflected in her eyes. "The one with the blood on her hands."

Oh. That lady friend.

  


I stood on London Bridge and thought.

"Penny for your thoughts?" someone asked over my shoulder.

"Hello, sorceress," I said.

Penny stepped up beside me and leaned over the side of the bridge with her hands clasped. "Why the long face, sorcerer?" she asked.

"The usual. Foreboding. Eminent doom. End of the line."

"Oh, that sort of thing. Do you suppose you could put that off for another week or so?"

"Probably not," I said. "Why?"

"I've… I've just met someone and I'd like to at least give it a go before the apocalypse gets in the way."

"Sorry."

"What seems to be the trouble this time?"

"Neon Court is in a foul mood." I rested my elbows on the railing and my head on my palms.

"Wonderful. I hope you weren't playing silly buggers with them."

"Not me."

Penny turned around so that she faced the wind, setting her braids flapping. "By your increasingly grave expression I would say it's Oda who has done something."

"I have an Oda-has-done-something expression?"

"You do, actually. It didn't take me three years to notice, if you're wondering. It involves any mention of her as well."

We were so taken aback by this information that we stood there in silence for about a minute. "Good to know," I said finally and heard Penny smile. "I'm contemplating what to say to her after these last three years. Something like 'Hullo. It's been a while. Have you or the Order been poking around the Neon Court lately by any chance? I think you'd better shove off or things will get nasty really quite quickly.'"

"I've only met your Oda once, but somehow I don't think that warning is going to suffice," Penny noted and I watched her beam her smile at a passing motorist who was making a rude gesture at several jeering teenage boys.

"It's worth a shot."

"I suppose. What's the worst – "

"Don't say it!"

"Sorry."

  


***

 **First Interlude: The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Assassin**

 _In which the sorcerer's apprentice has an encounter with a curious magician-killer and things somehow do not end in death and destruction._

  


This is how Penny met Oda, or, at least this is what Penny told me much, much later.

Penny Ngwenya was a young woman, newly trained in looking at things for magical potential, and pleased to find her life taking this new direction. Of course, the Aldermen were a constant bother, as if they were sure she would explode at any moment, taking half of the city with her, and she knew that they argued with me about this every chance they could.

The Order and the Aldermen were naturally in perfect agreement over this and so a representative was sent. Sinclair came to visit me one morning while I was sitting on the pavement and playing cards with a street urchin. The boy had beaten me soundly out of my gloves and shoes and was on his way to my coat, but we were determined to win everything back.

"Matthew, a word?" Sinclair had asked in the sort of tone schoolmasters use when they are about to tell you that they know you've been copying someone else's work and you had better stop or There Will be Consequences. "Concerned citizen" or not, things had to be quite serious for Dudley Sinclair to sound so concerned.

So I slipped into an alley, and it was no surprise at all to see Charlie leaning against the bricks. "Why, all things considered, you look well, Matthew," Sinclair said.

I shrugged.

"I know you are a very smart young man, so of course you know why I'm here."

"Penny."

"Yes, Ms Ngwenya is a bit of a concern to all parties involved, you understand."

"And yet I'm still going to train her. You can't just shove her off to Scotland or some other blasted place without any sort of knowledge and not expect that to end badly. That would be like saying, 'Here's this bomb. We don't feel like defusing it so we're going to leave it with you. Maybe you ought to throw it in the ocean.'"

"I do see your point, but – "

"Good, then that settles it." I moved to exit the alley and heard a faint growl from Charlie.

"Matthew," said Sinclair apologetically, "as Midnight Mayor, you should understand the dangers to this city very well. She cannot remain here."

"She can and she will _because_ I am the Midnight Mayor," I said tightly.

"I see. Well, keep your enemies close and all that."

"She's isn't our enemy."

"We will be watching, Matthew."

"Good. You can expand my watchdog Oda's duties to my apprentice."

In retrospect, probably not the best choice of words.

  


Three months into her training and things were looking up for Penny. Or they were because the Aldermen seemed less inclined to shove her off a platform or roast her alive or stab out her eyeballs and make it all look like an accident. On one particular day, she was walking down the underground tunnel between the Angel and Old Street stations. The City Road station was somewhere in between, a station closed in the 1920s because of its uselessness, and I, in my infinite wisdom, had sent Penny down below to discover the magic of the closed tube station.

Armed with a torch and a bagel, Penny stood shivering and wondered why she couldn't have just broken in from the old City Road entrance instead of sneaking around the tunnels. "Bugger and blast," she grunted and sat down in a grimy slot in the wall to pause and eat her bagel.

A rat, nose keenly aware of the intruder's snack, perched on the stone beside her and squeaked. Penny broke off a piece and tossed it over. When the rat had munched away at this treat, she switched to its eyes and sent it skittering down the tunnel.

A train passed and the wind disturbed a strange scent up ahead. Penny urged the rat forward to investigate and found herself viewing what seemed to the rat to be a large pair of boots attached to human legs and up towards a torso encased in a leather jacket.

Penny released the rat and went off in search of this mysterious stranger. She kept close to shadows, keeping her torch pointed down and her finger ready to turn it off at any moment.

When the moment arrived, she was wholly unprepared. A hand reached out and struck the torch out of her hand and shoved her against the wall of the tunnel with a gun positioned under her chin.

Penny struggled for a moment, instincts taking over, and then promptly gave up when the person struck her upside the head with the palm of her hand. The fallen torch gave her an unexpectedly good view of her attacker, a woman with a burn above one of her eyes and only a faint fuzz of hair on her head.

"You're Oda," Penny said.

"And you're Penny Ngwenya. How do you know me, sorceress?"

"Matthew," Penny said. "He told me about you, when you visited him in hospital."

Oda gave my apprentice a cruel smile that twisted her lips mockingly. "And what did the sorcerer say?"

It was Penny's turn to smile, wholly different than Oda's malicious one that promised a nasty end. "Very little, which says a lot. He regrets things said and unsaid. I suspect that he is waiting for your bullet in his back."

"I would not give Matthew the out of not seeing his end anymore," Oda said.

"You would shoot him in the front? You know there's that saying that goes something like, 'Enemies stab you in the back. Friends stab you in the front.'"

Oda jerked the gun tighter against Penny's throat until it hurt and she gasped. "Friendship is not what I would use to describe our association. Now tell me why I should not shoot you here all alone in this tunnel where no one will find your body until it has been picked clean by the rats."

Penny gulped. "I understand that not knowing isn't the greatest excuse for what I did," she explained, "that being ignorant probably doesn't acquit me in the eyes of righteous nut jobs such as yourself, but I bet you won't shoot me because you and Matthew worked so hard to give me back my hat that shooting me would make it all seem rather pointless."

For a moment, Oda did nothing and Penny grimaced and nearly shut her eyes at the bullet she was sure was coming.

And then Oda released her and stepped back into the shadows. She asked, "What are you doing down here, sorceress?"

Penny stood in shock for a moment before answering. "Matthew has decreed – " She paused to chuckle, as if I could possibly boss her around. " – That my latest lesson is to learn the more obscure magic of the tube. I'm to find the closed City Road station, but it's being illusive. I've been down here for three hours."

"City Road is just around the corner behind me," Oda said.

"Oh, you'd be surprised. I'm sure it was when you passed it, but it probably isn't any more. That's the thing about closed stations. They like to jump around the tunnels and pretend to be useful. I suppose they miss the passengers."

"I should have killed you."

"I suppose that you'll simply have to deal with that regret then."

"Tell Matthew that I am still watching."

"Oda, I can assure you that he knows that already."

There was no reply in the dark, so Penny picked up her torch and turned the corner. Of course, City Road wasn't there.

***

Another day. Another day standing at a bus stop when the cool barrel of a gun was suddenly pressed against the back of my skull.

"Oda," I breathed as she whispered, "Bang."

"We missed you too," we said.

"I told you I would kill you," she said.

"Um, yes, but I haven't done anything you would deem too Satanic lately. There was that incident about three years ago when the Aldermen and the Order got all out of sorts because I took Penny on as an apprentice, but that's turned out all right now, hasn't it? Also, have you or the Order been poking around the Neon Court lately by any chance?"

She pressed the gun more firmly against my head. "What do you know about it?"

"Very little," I said and felt her fingers coolly press into my left shoulder to keep me from jerking away. "Am I familiar with the Neon Court? Of course. Lady Neon left a message for me about how you should essentially bugger off."

Her fingers curved and her nails dug into my skin just a little. "And why would she leave the message with you, sorcerer?"

"How should I know? My charming personality? My status as chosen protector of the city? My previous interactions with you? If it's the latter, then, really, you have only yourself to blame."

"You are coming with me," she ordered and the gun left my head to nudge me in the back.

"Why?"

"You are taking me to the Neon Court."

"I'm pretty sure that's counterproductive," I said, although I started to walk down the pavement with her. It wasn't like I had a choice. Resisting her tended to be like resisting a landslide.

I glanced to the side to see that three years had changed her. Her hair, which had been burnt away the last time I had seen her, was present again, but it was now in short little unbraided ringlets that curled tight against her skull. Much of the red burns I had seen on her face were gone, although there was a pinkish patch above her eye and spreading faintly into her eyebrow. The tail end of one thin eyebrow was missing, perhaps permanently burnt away at the wingtip. (I wanted to ask if the Order had as good a health plan as they did a dentistry one, but bit my tongue instead.) However, there were other changes that could not be explained by our encounter with Mr. Pinner, like the thin scars along her throat. There were four of them running parallel like the claws or talons of some beast had attempted to slash her skin into ribbons.

When she said nothing for several minutes, I said, "We should stop for supplies," and went into the nearest little spot for tea. After we ordered the biggest blueberry scone for sale, Oda sat tensely across from us as if our very presence offended her.

"So how's the Order?" I asked, cheerfully expecting no response and receiving none. "Been smiting the wicked and all that?"

Oda gave me a long, bland look and then stared out the window. I sighed.

Two scones later, she asked, "What are we waiting for this time?"

"You can't expect to reach the Neon Court during the day," I said. "We need to at least wait until sundown if you anticipate finding it at all."

"Of course," she said tersely and returned her stare to the people milling about outside the window. We watched with some curiosity as she jumped at the tinkling bell above the front door and then later the sound of a chair being pushed back and scrapping against the wooden floor.

Not long before dusk, after two hours of tense silence, my mobile rang and her hand flew to her jacket pocket and flexed around the hidden weapon. I answered my phone without looking at the number and ignored the threatening look she aimed at me. "Swift."

"Matthew, I thought we were – " Penny began.

"Can't. I ran into a bit of a problem."

"Problem? Like what? Like you've got stomach cramps or like you're lying in a ditch somewhere bleeding out of every orifice?"

"Somewhere in the middle," I said.

"So far anyway, you mean," she said. "I could – "

"No," I cut her off and watched out of the corner of my eye as Oda looked sharply at me. "No," I said more softly. "Just stay inside after dark for a bit."

"The Neon Court?"

"Yes."

"You're such a prat."

"Thanks."

She sighed. Penny had a sigh that reminded me of my mother and made me wonder sometimes who was teaching whom. It was two parts exasperated, one part acquiescent, and three parts affectionate.

"I'll keep alert for news of your body being discovered in an alleyway beside a nightclub," she said.

"Hey, I have a faithful companion."

She snorted. "Oh yeah? Faithful in the religious sense, I'm sure. You're playing with bullets and hellfire, Matthew."

"Yeah, thanks. I got that."

There was another sigh and then she hung up. I snapped my mobile closed and slipped it back in my pocket. When I serenely folded my hands in my lap and gazed at my companion, she was studying me as if I'd been chatting about orgies and ritualistic murder.

I thought she was going to ask about the phone conversation, but I suppose I was just overestimating her capacity to give a damn. Instead, she asked, "Have we wasted enough time yet?"

I studied the expanding darkness in the sky and the lengthening shadows on the pavement, hiding deeper secrets around corners. Across the street, a neon sign flickered into life like some ridiculous goddamn Sign. Whether it was a good or bad Sign remained to be seen, but knowing my track record, the former seemed unlikely.

"Would it make a difference if I pointed out that Lady Neon is not someone you muck about with?"

"You know the answer to that."

I nodded and followed her out.

  


I led us to the nearest club, the sort of place that, despite the energy and life, made me feel terribly tired just looking at it. The pulsing beat reached us outside, a constant drumming that roared over the screams of ecstasy inside and reminded us sickeningly of Voltage and Boom Boom. The bouncer at the door of Elfame was busy checking the ID of some mousy little girl in a halter top who could be no older than sixteen. Her rail thin arms were poised on her nonexistent hips as if that would give her another few years.

"You're truly twenty-one?" the bouncer asked, as he eyed the ID.

"Yeah, 'course. Just had my birthday."

"Will you give tribute to this nightclub?"

"What?"

"How about five years of your life so you can be old enough? That sounds fair."

"Oh hell," I said, remembering the disastrous Black Cab ride, as Oda said, "He's serious, isn't he?"

I politely shoved the girl away from the door and said in a conversational tone, "Now, now, shouldn't you be at home, doing your maths schoolwork or something?"

"Hey!" she squeaked, hugging herself now and rocking on her platform shoes. "What's your deal? I'm not – "

"Old enough to drive a car? Yeah, we know. Now just –

"I just wanna – "

"What you want to do is go home and not lose five years of your existence," we said and she backed away as if we were raving mad. Not so far from the truth really.

"Fuck you," she hissed and wobbled away, clutching her fake ID to her chest.

"She'll only wander to another club and the result will be the same," the bouncer pointed out and grinned, displaying teeth that were as small and pointed as a shark's. "All clubs are ours."

"Yeah, but not all of them are manned by you," I pointed out.

He shrugged. "My cousin is in charge of the door of one a street over," he said. "He won't let her go so easily."

I gritted my teeth and counted to ten before speaking. "Let's get this over with, shall we?" I asked and sneered.

He squared his big shoulders and looked down at me with scorn. "You will be in the presence of royalty, mayor," he explained. "I suggest you lose the little boy's pretence of Being a Tough Guy and give in to any urge to wet your pants. That way the lady doesn't chew you up and spit you out."

"I'll – " My throat went very dry and I had to clear it to keep from sounding prepubescent. "We'll consider it," we said finally.

The bouncer smirked and moved towards the black door set in the bricks and then paused. Oda had moved out of the shadows of the building into the light above the doorway. He looked straight at her and then laughed. "Oh, I wish I was inside for this."

Before I could ask about this cryptic statement, he was pushing us inside and the door was slamming shut with a bang that was greatly muffled by the sounds of the club within. On reflex, I clutched my ears at the pounding of the bass in the walls. I was pleased to see speakers hidden in the dark rolls of sheer fabric flowing from the walls instead of mysterious music popping out of nowhere.

Music, if you could call the cacophony that. It was so intense that the lyrics were unintelligible and screaming down as a reminder that, as a member of the population that was over thirty, I was not supposed to understand the thrill. I grimaced and searched through the undulating bodies in tight outfits (leather was prominent which made us wonder about the chaffing) and the flickering coloured lights for something that suggested the royalty of the nightlife.

Oda let out a small, annoyed noise. I followed where she was looking to see two petite women twirling around together with their hair gleaming like wire and their eyes flashing with the pale luminescence that comes from a black light shined on a white shirt.

"Huh," I said, not taking my eyes off those two. "You're getting better at spotting mystic bleeding forces. I'm surprised."

She grunted.

I smiled, had to smother a chuckle so she didn't see my wry facial expression, and brushed past her in the direction of the bright Neon Court girls.

  


As we approached, one of the girls grinned at me with glowing white teeth and grabbed my wrist, dragging me forward. "Dance with us, sorcerer," she said slyly.

The other girl, who I suspected, despite how they both looked exactly alike, might be the vapid Neena I had met before, chirped, "Yeah, like. It's imperative."

She snatched up my other wrist. The electricity sizzling along their skin reacted with our blue electric fire and zapped at them. The Neon Girls jerked back with their skin glowing reddish orange and buzzing faintly.

"Nee, Nobe," a woman purred. "You mustn't play with the sorcerer." Out of the chaos of bodies, Lady Neon emerged. Her eyes glowed with the light of the neon signs, a reddish orange much brighter than the Girls' skin and hangover-painful to look at. Her wiry hair was long and piled up on top of her head in a bird's nest and her nails were tiny, bright white LED lights. Where the Neon Girls wore leather and metal bits, Lady Neon was painted into a skin-tight silver dress that barely brushed mid-thigh. Below, miles and miles of orange skin trailed down to four inch stilettos.

She gave me a very sharp-toothed grin, filled with all sorts of after-dark promises, and said, "Why don't we go somewhere more private?"

Oda stepped forward and said, "I think we can talk right here. I have only one thing to say to you."

The look that Lady Neon gave Oda was something a lot less pleasurable and a lot more dangerous. "Let me speak for you, girl." She said it like a verbal roll of her eyes, full of contempt. "Your Order has attacked me. Shutting down my establishments with permit violations and other bureaucratic nightmares. While that is much more intelligent than using a gun or some holy water, you have given me the right to retaliate and I will do so if you don't stop."

"You already – " Oda said.

"No, I have not retaliated against the Order. Yet."

" _Lies_." The venom in Oda's voice surprised the Neon Girls and me. A hush spread around the nightclub, as if they sensed a fight brewing like a circle of vultures. "That abomination that paces around me every night – "

"Why would I summon such a creature when it would be so much easier to send a shadow in the night, courtesy of the lord of the lonely traveller who is at my beck and call, to silence you and your little group?"

"As if you could silence – "

"Don't go all righteous and holy on me, girl!" Lady Neon snarled and the lights buzzed and whined overhead and everyone on the dance floor watched. "You have spilled enough blood to fill the Thames!" She calmed and that switch in emotion, as sudden and volatile as a chemical reaction, was more frightening. We suddenly wanted to run. "But I bet you've given Mr Swift here plenty of reasons to summon such a hellish phantom back from the depths."

All eyes on the sorcerer. "Oda," I asked, "what does she mean?"

"Ah, playing the innocent," Lady Neon said and hummed with laughter that spread throughout the club, her Court.

Oda didn't look at me, but her shoulders were set and angry as the Court jeered at her.

"Oda?" we whispered.

She whipped around to look me in the eyes and whispered, "When we walk out those doors, something is going to attack me. Will it attack you as well?"

I swallowed. "I didn't summon anything, so yes?"

A pause. Complete and utter silence lived and breathed in the room, while she debated with herself. "I guess we'll see," she said finally.

I very much doubted I was going to like this test.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read and review. Even if it's just to tell me I'm obviously an American writing about Brits.
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own _A Madness of Angels_ or _The Midnight Mayor_. Those are the creations of the wonderful Kate Griffin, aka Catherine Webb.


	2. Part I: The Test

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a tenuous friendship between a sorcerer and a magician-killer is put to the test and the dead come back to play.

The silence followed us out to the front step, where the bouncer was mysteriously absent.

"Whatever you think I've done, I really haven't," I said when nothing jumped out at us.

"Save me your excuses, sorcerer," Oda said, pulling out her gun. It made a very loud click in the quiet. I couldn't even hear a rat scuttling among the bags of rubbish sitting in the alley beside the club. It was… eerie.

Perhaps that should've been our first clue.

Someone started whistling. It was a little folksy rhythm that made one want to hum along, but mostly it raised the hair on the back of our neck.

The whistling broke off into hums and then whistles again and someone shuffled and tapped their feet like they were in a musical. I finally realized it was coming from down the alley. A figure emerged, clothed in brown rags, with thick matted dark hair and a stench that wasn't unfamiliar for an alley.

His skin was as dark as Oda's, but I wasn't sure if it was natural or grime. He lifted up his head and gave us a gap-toothed grin. I got a good look at the weird squiggles of red on his forehead, hiding half under the wiry black fringe, and realized they were made from dried blood.

I stepped back so suddenly that I smacked into Oda.

He spoke.

"Hello."

It was the kind of creepy-as-shit cheerful tone that made every nerve in my body freak and my stomach twist in on itself. It probably would've made dogs howl, but they were smartly nowhere to be found, just like every other animal.

Oda cocked her gun and fired into the man's forehead. It ripped through his flesh, dead centre, and passed through and into the bricks behind him.

He grinned.

I grimaced. "Who the hell is that?"

Oda frowned at me and studied my face, as if she was gauging my reaction. "That," she said, "is my brother."

"Um," I said and glanced back at the figure in the alley, who was just innocently gazing at us as calm as you please. "I thought you said he was dead." That was when the figure sprang forward, faster than I could blink, and brought a knife down towards my head. We scrambled out of the way and darted after Oda, who paused in the alley and lifted her gun. It went off with a muted bang and passed another bullet through the man's skull. Of course, it had about as much effect as the first time.

"Dead to me, maybe," she muttered and then gave me a sharp, dangerous look as we ran down the passage. "I said no such thing to you."

"You're right," I said, panting. "It was Chaigneau."

"You asked Chaigneau?"

"It was a long time ago."

Oda's face looked pinched and bleak as we dashed onto another street. "You should know better than anyone that dead is not always dead."

"Oh, that kind of dead. _Lovely._ "

"Do you have to – " she hissed and then took a deep breath. "We need to get out of here before he decides – "

"Sister!" came the singsong voice.

"That is really fucking creepy," I said.

She glared at me as we took another corner and into an alley. We stumbled through upended cardboard boxes and a blanket-wrapped old man who snored loudly. "Yes, because reanimated sorcerers are so terribly natural," she said, as we exited onto a street and her brother appeared at the end of it.

"Hey, I am not a zombie," I grumbled.

She ignored this comment and readied her gun. "You're just wasting bullets," I pointed out cheerfully.

"Fine. Then be useful, sorcerer."

We grinned. There was plenty of garbage lying around that we should have been able to assemble a decent litterbug and –

And then the Order came barrelling in and ran Oda's undead brother over with a Hummer.

You can't make something like that up.

They took a vehicle that ridiculous and used it to flatten a zombie witch doctor. Then, they came hurtling over to us, while I gaped stupidly.

Oda opened the passenger door and climbed inside. While we continued to do nothing except stare at Oda's brother slowly pulling himself off the asphalt, the back window of the Hummer lowered just enough so that they could stick the barrel of a dart gun through.

That got my attention. "Oh, come _on_ – " I began before it was lights out. End of the line. Again.

  


I woke to the pleasant sensation of someone yanking me back by my hair and bit my lip to keep from yelling. "Good morning, sorcerer," a familiar bastard said as he came into my field of vision.

"Is it actually morning, Chaigneau?" I asked tiredly. My head was pounding with the blood pulsing behind my temples like a jackhammer and it didn't help that someone was still holding me by my hair while someone else bound me with rough hands that yanked my arms behind me.

Chaigneau smiled, as calm and cool as he had been once before when we had cursed him with our blood. He would not make the same mistake again. Even the hands at my wrists and in my hair were gloved. No one was taking any chances with us. "I do not think that you need concern yourself with such things, sorcerer," he said. "There is nothing here for you to use. This house has no electricity nor is it near any. No telephone lines in this room for you to escape to either. You have been reduced to the snivelling little man that you are."

We laughed. The sound echoed around the stone and a scrawny boy among the Order members in the room stepped back against the wall. I glanced past Chaigneau's shoulder to see Oda standing at the door with another woman. I met her eyes squarely and did not look away until she did.

"I'm glad you find all of this very amusing, Swift," Chaigneau said, but he was no longer smiling. "You have made an error in toying with us with this walking devil."

I had to laugh at that a little. "Your lot botched up and tried to take on the literal Spirit of the Goddamn Nightlife for no reason other than you didn't feel like harassing me for a few years because I have Aldermen nursemaids watching my every move and now you think I'm the one who resurrected Oda's crazy brother. Brilliant! You must be so pleased with yourselves over this logical deduction."

Chaigneau sighed and crouched down to my level. "Swift, we need to know how to stop this abomination."

"You can stuff – "

"You sent this monster after our Order and we will – "

"Is the brother even going after the Order? Because it sounded to me like it's just trailing around Oda every night and – "

A punch to the solar plexus sent me to my knees like tumbling bricks, as a kick to my back knocked me forward so that my face was pressed into the floor.

"What I'm trying to say," I said as I moved my head so that my cheek was on the stones instead, "is how did Oda manage to piss off Lady Neon more than the rest of you?"

"I do not need to analyze the motivations behind a demon such as Lady Neon," Chaigneau said derisively. "However, I find it more likely that you decided to take vengeance on Oda."

Fists clenched behind my back, I lifted my head and glared at him and his pleased expression of self-righteous bullshit. "Oh yeah. I went to all this trouble to try to off the only member of your group that I can tolerate. _Genius._ "

"Why don't you let me speak to the blue electric angels, Swift?"

"Oh, sod off," I grunted and braced for the kicks and punches that I knew were coming. They did not disappoint.

  


Sometime later, we realized that we were slumped against one stone wall of that room and chained to it. We clinked and jingled as we sat up.

I took stock. Ribs? Well, who needed them anyway? Although it would've been nice to be able to breathe more easily. Back? Probably bruised with interesting boot-shaped patterns. Stomach? Thoroughly empty. I had vomited up those scones at some point.

When I lifted up my head and looked towards the door across the little room, it didn't really surprise me to see Oda leaning against that wall.

"So, how did you manage to piss off the Neon Court this much?" I grunted.

She rolled her eyes. "I think you should worry more about the Order right now, sorcerer."

"Yeah, I'll get right on that. By the way, do you think Kemsley will have a conniption and a heart attack and die if I make Penny the Midnight Mayor with my dying breath?"

"That doesn't concern me."

"Yes, of course, because you're busy waging an utterly pointless war against the Neon Court."

Oda said nothing. She simply stared at me, arms crossed, with an expectant look that made my skin prickle.

"Oda," I said very softly and set my hands on the floor with my palms flat against the cold stone. "Oda, listen. Lady Neon is not someone you muck about with. I swear – I swear it. Go with the Order and wage this war and that's it. End of the line."

I was surprised by how angry she got. "Is that your mantra?" she hissed. "You're a coward. Why would I listen to you?" she asked and left my cell with the bang of a steel door in a steel frame.

However, I was not really surprised that she had left. I found it more interesting that she had called me a coward but not a spawn of Satan.

  


We slept. It was something to do at least.

Sometimes, Chaigneau interrupted to bully us some more. Oda was noticeably absent for what felt like days but probably weren't.

The scrawny boy was in the room one day with two fingers missing on his left hand. His freckles stood out vividly against the pale skin of his knuckles and along his cheekbones. I wondered what nightclub he had raided with the Order.

When Oda did show up to one of Chaigneau's sessions, we turned on her.

"The Neon Court is going to delight in spilling your guts out on their dance floor!" we snarled. "Your bloody almighty Order cannot save you from something like this, Oda! _What have you done?_ "

It was the first time we had spoken since we had entered that room and of course Chaigneau was delighted, Oda was unmoved, and everyone else looked frightened or angry.

"We have done what is _necessary_ , sorcerer," said Chaigneau and left with a smile. Two men kicked us until we screamed, but we were hungry and cold and weak and our blood did not burn, even when we spit it at one of their boots.

  


A few hours later, we were huddled in a corner and shivering. There was a rat somewhere in the building that we had briefly communicated with. With its eyes, we had studied the whole place, top to bottom, and discovered that it was small, totally electricity-free and housed only two others during the night. Both had guns and were never the same two nights in a row. The Order's House of Self-Righteous Bullshit must have been somewhere a few miles away so that they could use their electricity without worrying about us. We felt almost flattered that they found us this dangerous.

The boy brought us a plate of standard prisoners' fare – a tiny loaf of questionable bread and a glass of water – and left without looking us in the eye. No fruit. Maybe we would die of scurvy. That would be almost funny.

We savoured the glorious food and decided to use the rat's eyes for a while. It pattered across the concrete floor above us and discovered a little nibble of bread. It bit into the morsel and looked around at the high, darkened windows and twitched its nose. Best to be alert.

The rat sprang away when a door opened and footsteps reverberated through the room. We got dizzy with the lightning views of a tiny sliver in the wall and dozens of tunnels within.

We disconnected from the rat's eyes and waited for the familiar boots to reach us.

  


Oda entered. I squirmed as she stood by the shut door for a long time not saying anything. "During my inauguration," I finally began and waited for her to look at me. "During my inauguration, I saw dead people," I said very seriously.

She looked bored, although I had a feeling that she was intrigued somewhere in that façade. "Dana," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes, and Bakker and Vera." I didn't mention Kemsley because, really, who cares about him?

"Interesting."

"And myself."

"And a dragon? Are you sure the Aldermen didn't drug you?"

"It was… trippy," I admitted. "But that's beside the point. I'm telling the truth."

"Fine. And how was that possible if you were just talking to dead people?"

"Me, the Matthew Swift that died at the hands of Bakker's shadow, said it was like Star Trek."

"Star Trek," she said carefully.

"Yes. Have you denounced that too?"

"Only the new movie."

"Are you kidding me?"

"I never am."

"Right," I said and almost laughed. She caught my near-slip and frowned. "Teleporting turned me into little ones and zeroes for two years and then I was reassembled. I'm like a copy of the dead me."

"A clone. How science fiction of you."

"You," I said and paused to clear my throat or I would have smiled. "You ruin all of my snappy pop culture references."

She shrugged.

"Why are you here?" I asked finally.

"I figured you would get into trouble if I didn't indulge your 'snappy pop culture references' now and then," she said.

"Thanks. I think."

We stayed there and pointedly did not look at each other for a while.

"Oda," I said and stared up at the ceiling. It was made of smooth, moist blocks of stone that looked faintly mouldy. "What's the story of you and your brother?"

"You really think I'm going to tell you that?"

"Not really," I muttered. "Just felt like filling the silence. I suppose I shouldn't throw stones. Glass houses and all that."

"Right. Have you seen your grandmother since you were resurrected?" She said the last word distastefully, but I hardly noticed.

My head snapped down and I glowered at her. "The Order had better not – "

"The Order saw only a doddering old woman when we investigated you."

"I hadn't checked on her. I wasn't sure…" I cleared my throat. "Good to know," I said in the end.

  


The next time she came, about three days later I figured by my food intake, I finally put the pieces together and we got into an argument over the Neon Court.

"Is it worth it?" I asked. Oda raised one burnt eyebrow and waited for me to explain. "That kid who brings me my meals is going to lose something a hell of a lot more important than some fingers if you don't stop this with the Neon Court. How about you tell me what you did?"

"I didn't start this."

"Maybe not, but you certainly forced Lady Neon to take you seriously."

"Her Court should fear us."

"I'm fairly certain that she's just toying with you actually."

That got her attention. She clenched her fists and walked a little closer to me. There was still half of the room between us, but now I could just reach her. A tactical error from the psycho-bitch?

"What," she asked and paused angrily, "makes you think that she isn't just scared of me?"

"Did you decide to use the system to close some of her seedier clubs?"

"I made a suggestion," she admitted with her arms crossed.

"A suggestion," I repeated and shook my head. "You could have gone in there, guns blazing, and you took the bureaucratic route? Lady Neon probably knows everything about the Order. Doing this has actually thrown her a little and now she wants to play with you. Possibly even wanted to see what would happen when she threw me into the mix."

"We have now, as you put it, gone in with 'guns blazing.'"

"Sure, but she couldn't care less about that."

"Fine." She glared at me for a moment and then her features smoothed over into a kind of tranquillity. "Why haven't you escaped yet?"

We smiled. "Haven't felt like it."

"Meaning, you can't?"

"Oda, you know I never tell you my limits."

She noticed how close my legs were and stepped back out of range. "I think," she said and there was a note of warning in her voice, "that you haven't left because you think I need your help in getting rid of Lady Neon's curse."

"I think you should consider it."

"I have been destroying magic for a very long time, sorcerer."

"I'm sure. You're what? Thirty? I'm shaking in my trainers. Oda, the fact that he is still following you around, threatening to cut your throat and lick your blood, means that you could probably use someone like me around."

"What about them?"

"We will help," we said.

"I think I've had enough of using a lesser abomination to stop a greater one."

I snorted. "Oh, come on. That's bullshit and you know it," I said.

"The Order will take care of my brother."

"The Order doesn't give a damn about that. If they did, they would help! They're just using it as a convenient excuse to bring out the big guns against the Neon Court and me in one fell swoop!"

She came in closer and jammed the barrel of her gun between my eyes. "The Neon Court preys on children."

I tried not to stare cross-eyed at the gun. "The Order throws children into the fray against them," I said. "Totally not the same thing or anything. This will kill you and a bunch of stupid brainless kids. Go back to quiet bureaucracy. Encourage police raids. Hell, why don't you ask the Midnight Mayor for some resources from the Aldermen?"

"The Aldermen are not going to destroy the Neon Court."

"No, you're right," I admitted. "I mean, the Neon Court is basically a symbol of the belief in Night-time Revelry, a Good Time, et cetera, and you can't really destroy an entire concept like that. But they will try to regulate it a bit in London, just to keep kiddies safe and what-have-you. Especially if I got particularly cranky. Try to think on a smaller scale maybe?"

"I would die for my faith," she said carefully.

"Your faith and self-preservation are not two different things," I said. "Oda, let me help you. I can stop the curse if you just trust me."

"Trust, yes. You were entirely truthful with me about Penny Ngwenya."

"Hey, the fact that you even thought about trusting what you deemed a 'spawn of Satan' should mean something. Please. Just please listen to me. To me." My voice broke embarrassingly. Words shattered and splintered to hang between us unsaid and, for the first time in ages, she really looked at me.

And she left. I sighed and slumped forward.

  


About five hours later, she appeared again. I didn't bother to look up even when she was kneeling down beside me. Everything felt faded and bleak and then the rings around my wrists snapped open and I could move my arms again.

"Oda?"

"Quiet," she hissed. She met my eyes as she worked on the rope around my ankles.

"What're you – "

She finished on my legs and shoved me back into the wall with a hand on my chest. "Shut up," she said. "Matthew, if you so much as breathe wrong, I will chain you up again and you can rot here, _damn you_ , for all I care. Do you understand me?"

I nodded, although I really didn't.

However, I did notice that she was bleeding steadily out of a cut on her forehead. There was a bruise there too.

"Oda," I said and almost regretted it when she gave me a glare that seriously made me fear for my life, "did someone pistol whip you in the forehead?"

"There was a disagreement."

"A disagreement? Like polite political conversation over tea?" I stood up and wobbled a little. My wrists stun, my legs were asleep, and I all around felt very much like I'd been dead again.

" _Matthew._ "

"Got it. I'll shut up for the moment."

I was almost positive that she muttered, "Small mercies," under her breath.

  


I used the rat to figure out if there was anyone else around the building. Oda noticed. I guess suddenly having beady black eyes is kind of noticeable. She jammed her elbow in my sternum.

"Oomph," I said eloquently, as my eyes returned to blue. "Was that necessary?"

"It's hard enough getting used to your glow-in-the-dark eyes without that," she said matter-of-factly.

"I apologize. Next time I get resurrected, I'll tone down on the radioactivity."

As we crept down a long stone hallway, I heard her sigh.

  


Outside the building was a field. An honest-to-God, middle-of-nowhere sort of field with long grass waving gently in the wind, bleeding songbirds singing somewhere in the trees, and glaring sunlight. I hadn't seen sunlight in a while and, even though it was clearly only an hour or so past dawn, I winced.

There was also a Hummer sitting in the grass with Chaigneau standing against it and aiming a gun in our general direction. I think he was aiming at me, but Oda was close, so close that I could smell her hair. It smelled of smoke and the city and the thick, dusty scent of a nightclub. Other gunmen crouched in the grass around us, as obvious in their dark clothes as it was possible to be.

"Oda," said that smug bastard. "The Order will pray for your soul."

Oda jerked back as if she had been struck and then smiled. It looked almost peaceful. And then she shrugged and lifted her gun.

Chaigneau took that moment to open his mouth to say something else insipid. I took the opportunity to release a little spark through the wiring of the car and set his gas tank alight.

It let out a satisfying boom and threw Chaigneau to the grass. Oda grabbed my wrist and took off through the trees.

Some followed. Most stayed with the car and their leader. Oda took care of the followers with well-placed bullets.

I used the little space left over in my brain during the marathon run to wonder why Oda had turned traitor.

I couldn't come up with a reasonable answer to counter her usual fanaticism and thought it probably wasn't the best time to ask.

It never hurts though.

"Why are you doing this?" I yelled as I nearly tripped over a fallen tree branch covered in honest to God multicoloured mushrooms.

"I am holding a gun, Matthew," she yelled back and pulled me to the left.

I wisely shut up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own _A Madness of Angels_ or _The Midnight Mayor_. Those are the creations of the wonderful Kate Griffin, aka Catherine Webb.


	3. Part II:  Blood of My Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which family becomes a theme and it is time to take flight.

Oda sat and read her e-mail with the detached air of someone who was not in the least bit concerned that both of us were garnering strange looks from everyone else in sight. I tried to smile reassuringly at the old woman in the computer station across from ours, but it was hard to do so with my jaw aching and bruised and she hid behind her monitor as if I’d made a rude gesture.

Oda stood up and slipped around the desk without saying a word. “What – ” I began and then hurried to catch up with her. The bell clanged as we passed out into the grey afternoon. She rounded a corner into an alley and leaned against the bricks with her arms crossed. I waited about ten seconds of her staring down at her feet before blurting out, “So?”

“So?” she repeated without looking up.

“So what are we doing now?”

“We have to get out of the country,” she said and did meet my gaze. It was no shock to see that she was as cold and determined as ever, but there was fatigue there. As if she was resigned to her fate.

“Did you get hate mail from the Order?”

“Something to that effect. I now get top priority above you.”

“I feel mildly insulted by that,” I said as she pushed off from the wall and started down the rubbish-filled alley. I kicked a glass bottle that clinked against the bricks and buried itself amongst the plastic bags. “Do you have a way of getting a passport for someone who spent two years technically dead?”

She did not answer, which I took to mean she had suspicious underground contacts outside of the Order.

“Sinclair might – ” I started. She stopped walking and held out her arm to block me.

“Sinclair organized this!” she snarled.

“Oh.”

“Oh!” she mimicked and curled her outstretched hand into a fist.

We wondered briefly if she was going to strike us, but she reined herself back in. I felt a slight tingle of guilt, as if I had robbed Oda of the only family she had left.

“Oda,” I said softly. She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her tight, black jacket. “Oda, we have to visit someone before we go.”

 

On the bus ride, Oda rang someone up. She spoke very softly and hung up in less than a minute. Then, she turned to me and said, “You haven’t asked again.”

“About why you suddenly betrayed the Order for no apparent reason?” I asked cheerfully, as I gazed out at the passing countryside. Stupid bloody countryside.

She rolled her eyes and said, “The Order had my brother resurrected.”

That got my attention. “No fucking way.”

She told me what happened.

 

***

 **Second Interlude: The Brother**

 _In which Oda explains the situation in very brief terms._

“After I left you yesterday, I rendezvoused with others outside a club. But, there was no one there. Apparently, there had been a change of plans. The higher ups wanted us to pull out and let someone else take care of the Neon Court.

“It was my brother. We exchanged pleasantries. I defended _innocents_ ,” she spat the word out like bile stinking in the back of her throat.

“Not simply collateral damages?” I asked.

“Children. Caught in the snares of the Court, but… unnecessary.”

“Could you please repeat that?”

“No.”

“Oh. Carry on then.”

She stared at me, daring me to make any more comments, and continued. “Lady Neon was grateful… The end.”

***

 

I nodded very slowly. “Resurrecting your brother crosses a line?”

She didn’t answer.

“So what? Are you cutting all ties with the Order?”

“There is a sect in the States.”

“Oh goodie,” I said and clapped lazily. “I really wanted to take a vacation to visit more religious nut jobs that may or may not agree with your opinion.”

Silence. There was something more to the story. Some bone deep betrayal maybe, or perhaps I was just being melodramatic.

Either way, I had a feeling it would be a very, very long time before Oda said anything about the subject to me again.

 

I stood outside the little white building at five o’clock as the sun sank behind it and felt like a schoolboy again. I toed the ground, hesitated at the bottom of the creaky old steps, tapped my fingers against the banisters, and may not have ended up going inside at all if it had not been for Oda. She prodded me in the back and forced me to stumble up the stairs.

The peeling screen door scraped open at my tug and it took a considerable amount of willpower to step over the threshold. The woman at the front desk was young and bored, obviously here only for the summer hols. She did not even look up from her mobile as we passed.

Oda followed me up the rickety stairs. The first room on the left was some sort of common room with old ladies knitting and both genders engaged in a furious debate in front of a game show. We continued on to the third room on the right. It was as if I had never been gone. I opened the door to find my mad old gran sitting under the window with the pigeons all around. As one, they all turned to us; my gran didn’t. The smell of moulting feathers was strong.

“You been back for how long, boy, and you ain’t visit?” she asked. I could tell by how gummy she sounded that her false teeth were out. “And don’t you lie to me. The pigeons told me all, didn’t they?”

“’Ello, Gran.”

“Don’t get shirty with me, boy.”

“I’m – Yes, Gran,” I said and actually heard Oda bite back a laugh.

My gran turned to look at us then, but I didn’t think she could actually see with her own eyes. They were cloudy with a tint of pigeon-iris orange. She was wearing an ancient pink robe and slippers and her hair was long and silvery grey. Grabbing a knotty cane, she smacked her thigh with it and said, “Well, what’d I tell you? You been listening all these years or just daydreaming?”

I shrugged. “The shadow got me,” I admitted.

“Teach you to keep your wits about you?” she grunted.

Oda snorted.

“I try,” I told both of them.

“Trying ain’t doing,” Gran said and then fixed her eyes and those of every ratty bird upon Oda. Under so much attention, she looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Are you going to introduce your friend, boy?” Gran demanded.

“Of course,” I said and had to fight not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Gran, this is Oda. Oda, this is my grandmother.”

Oda surprised all of us by stepping forward and offering her hand. “It’s a pleasure, ma’am,” she said. I mostly think it was a pleasure for her to see me squirm, but Gran accepted the handshake with a hand covered in bulging blue veins and liver spots. She seemed to deflate into her wheelchair after that. Many of the pigeons dispersed and flapped out of the window and I stood there unsure what to say to someone for probably the last time.

“You be a good boy, you hear?” she mumbled as her head sagged against her chest.

“Yes, Gran.”

“Stay away from telephone boxes unless it’s time to dance and dance again.”

“Yes, Gr – ” I looked at my scarred palm and grimaced. She was a little late on that one.

“Spinning around forever and ever and – ” She let out a loud snore.

“Goodbye, Gran,” I muttered and felt something tighten in my chest. I watched the pigeons peck at a plate of breadcrumbs on the windowsill and switched to their eyes for a moment to escape the heavy weight of everything pressing in from all sides.

“Matthew,” Oda said.

I took a shaky breath and returned to myself. “Hmm?”

“This is you.”

“What?”

I turned to see her looking at the picture frames clustered on the nightstand like monuments to the dead. My mother and grandfather were prominent. Mum in a flowery summer frock sitting on the front porch of my grandfather’s farm with pigtails in her hair. My grandfather wearing the tidy suit and silk tie that he used to wear every Sunday to church. Mum with me in her arms as a messy-haired infant.

I grimaced. “Yes, Oda, even wretched spawns of Satan, such as myself, have to start out somewhere.”

“It’s strange,” she whispered. “I’ve actually become used to your cursed blue eyes.”

“Thanks. I think. That one is me too.” I indicated the teen in the school uniform in the back. I had longish hair that stuck up in odd places and a dark-eyed scowl that indicated average teenage angst in most people of that age group, but actually was a sign that I had been deep into my descent of madness as the magic of the city overwhelmed everything else.

“Not my best years,” I said merrily.

“Before Bakker?”

“Before Bakker,” I confirmed and sat heavily on the edge of the stiff bed. It was covered in a pink and green flowery quilt that Gran had made for Mum’s birthday one year when I was small and Gran’s eyesight hadn’t been so poor.

That gave me a view of a tiny photo in the back of Mum, my dad, and me as a toddler. He had always been “my dad” and not “Dad.” I was surprised to realize that I couldn’t remember him as well as I’d thought. We shared a certain scrawniness that Vera had once, at a different time in My Old Dutch pancake house among a host of magicians and magician-haters, called the “starving pigeon” look.

Oda saw my frown but did not comment. “Well, that’s that then?” I said with a smile and we left.

 

Back in Oda’s Secret Hell Hole, which is where we ran to after dodging the Order the night before, the passport that Oda threw at my head had one minor oddity that I noticed instantly. “In this picture, I have brown eyes,” I noted.

“Coloured contact lenses,” she replied.

“And my name is Melvin?”

She said nothing, so I snatched up her passport. “And yours is Patricia? And we’re married? That or we’re brother and sister and one of us is clearly adopted. What joker made these passports?”

She continued to ignore me.

I was bored and worried. Oda’s little apartment (the Order apparently didn’t keep things like member addresses on file, which I found mildly hysterical) was all browns and greys and closed curtains. It didn’t have a television or hot water apparently, hence its nickname. I took a frigid shower and slumped on an ugly brown corduroy couch to sleep.

 

The phone rang with an annoying clang. I had only just dropped off to sleep so it was just a moment before I was fully aware again. Oda, who was sitting at the window staring out at the night with a gun in her lap and the desk lamp on at her elbow, looked at the phone and then at me. I grimaced. “The last time I answered a random phone in the middle of the night, things ended very, very badly,” I pointed out.

She made no move to answer it and we could not bear the impulse any longer. We dragged ourselves out of bed and padded across the stiff reddish brown carpeting. When we answered the phone, we heard:

“Sorcerer, do you want to know the power of blood slashed from a warm throat?”

I nearly dropped the receiver and Oda stood up, slipping the gun into the pocket of her jacket.

“It’s extremely potent, although not as much as it is when taken from the blood of one’s own kin,” said Oda’s brother in the calm, almost apologetic tone you would hear from a debt collector who is just reminding you that you owe several thousand pounds (and would you be so kind as to submit a payment of a few hundred by next week?). “You know, you are very easy to find. Your blue electric nature is like a beacon in the night.”

I hung up. I didn’t need to hear any more to know where to go. Oda followed us out without a word, but, as soon as we were settled onto a bus, she said, in a voice that reminded me very alarmingly of the one on the phone, “If he has done something to someone you know or the Order has, we cannot go there. It won’t do any good.”

“It’s my fault.”

“Most things are, sorcerer, but you can’t – ”

“Fucking hell,” I hissed and buried my face in my hands. “She knew. That’s why she said – My fault. Our fault. He wouldn’t have known – Our fault.”

“Matthew.”

“No. We have to run, but I can’t – No. Our fault. My fault. What if he goes after Penny?” A dim part of me realized that I was rocking back and forth on the cold bus seat and shivering.

“Matthew!”

“I couldn’t – we couldn’t – No – There’s no one else. Runrunrun _run_.”

Oda pulled my head up by my hair and out of my hands. It surprised us so much that we made no struggle and just blinked up at her as she held us by the roots. They still stung vaguely from the last time someone had grabbed me by the hair, but her touch was surprisingly gentle.

“Speak to me, Matthew,” she said firmly.

“Gran,” I said and I wasn’t sure if it sounded as much like a sob to her as it did to me, but I was almost embarrassed by it. “He’s killed Gran.”

She released my hair without a word and we passed the rest of the trip in silence. I could tell that she was not pleased about going into an obvious trap as she sat across the aisle from us with her arms crossed.

 

We didn’t bother with things like knocking or niceties. We passed a hand over the lock on the screen door and marched right in. A puddle of blood trailed out from behind the front desk. I did not look.

We met no one. There was the soft sound of the elderly snoring and our steps on the stairs. Gun drawn, Oda followed at our back. We found it more reassuring than we once would have. No time for thought.

Gran’s room was darker than the hallway. It took a long moment for my eyes to adjust and then I could only make out a figure in the wheelchair by the window.

In one swift motion, Oda snapped the light on. “Hello, sister,” said the figure in the chair.

Someone behind us cocked a gun and Oda threw me down and rolled away from the doorway. The shot fired wide as we tumbled towards the bed and I stole the electricity from the lights. I got one glimpse of a slumped, bloody shape on the bed before everything went dark.

Oda ended up on the bottom of our pile of limbs with her arms free. She levelled a gun at the Order member in the doorway, but he dove out into the hallway. I flipped off of her and tossed the light I had gathered at her brother’s face as he came at us with hands soaked in blood. Blood magic. Gran’s blood.

We snarled and relished in the brother’s cry of surprise as the light blinded him. We were prepared to dive for him, to tear him to pieces with our nails, when Oda grabbed our shoulder and shoved us towards the open window.

No pigeons this time. Instead, we went flying through the window to land below in a tangled heap in the shrubbery.

Oda’s landing was much more graceful. She landed in a crouch with one arm extended behind her and her gun arm pointed up at two gunmen in other windows.

“Run!” she hissed. My feet obeyed.

 

I don’t remember much of what happened next. The fall had not been kind to me. My mind was a confusing hurricane of blood and pain and Oda’s orders. I know we spent a long time running and then dodging through alleys while both cars and runners dashed after us.

The pain increased when Oda’s brother caught up. She gave him four rapid-fire shots before I had even assembled enough energy for a spark.

I think it must have been me that got him off our trail that night, but I hazily remember him vanishing into shadows.

Back at Oda’s dump, I slumped onto the couch. I don’t remember having any dreams.

In the morning, Oda woke me up with the scent of fresh bagels and I felt abruptly nauseous. I curled up on myself, flipped over so that I faced the back of the couch, and went back to sleep.

She prodded me in the back about five minutes later and tossed me my passport and ID.

Melvin. Ha.

 

Gatwick Airport was miserable and packed. We felt every bit of the confusion of the travellers milling about like ants on the hunt for food and it made our anxiety even worse. Our flight to Atlanta was in four hours and, although it was too crowded for anyone to find us and if they did we were prepared, or so Oda said, every suspicious person in a padded coat was a threat and even perfectly ordinary teenagers in too-tight clothing set us on edge.

I decided to hunker down on a bench in a corner to use my mobile, while Oda ate something that looked far too healthy for airport food. There had to be a catch somewhere.

Penny answered in two rings. “Sorcerer?”

“Hello, sorceress,” I said and ignored the pointed look Oda sent my way.

“Oi, where have you been? The Aldermen – ”

“Listen,” I said quickly. “You need to watch your back and – ”

“Is this one of those times when someone is like, ‘Stay behind and, bloody hell, don’t do anything stupid!’ and the other person gets left behind to deal with whatever the latest threat is and all that?” Penny asked.

“Well, I am leaving the country for a bit…”

“Fab. I suppose you haven’t told the Aldermen then?”

“No. Figured I would leave the message with you. By the way, can I temporarily give you the title of Midnight Mayor to watch over the city?”

“Well, searing pain didn’t just start in my hand so probably not, but I’ll try to convince the Aldermen that the woman whose insides they want to boil is now their boss. We’ll see how that goes.”

“Also, he should be following us, but watch out for resurrected witch doctors anyway.”

“Super fab. I look forward to that.”

“Domine – ”

“ – dirige nos,” she finished. “Yes, yes, I know.”

“Thank you, Penny.”

 

“You call her ‘sorceress?’” Oda asked in some amusement.

“She calls me ‘sorcerer,’ but not in a way that implies any Satanic implications like some people I could mention,” I grunted and drank the frothy grass-green drink that Oda had bought for us. “This,” I said in wonder and disgust, “tastes like health.”

“What a wonderful change for your stomach from the food the angels normally delight in,” she said. “Oh look, it only took the Aldermen four minutes to find us based on your call.”

“There’s no need to be smug,” I said, as we watched two men in long black trench coats make their way purposefully towards us. “I wanted them to.”

The men peered around, looking for threats I guess, and then muttered something into their Bluetooth headsets.

A woman sat down beside us on the bench and crossed her long, lean legs. They were encased in black trousers that flared out over pointed heels. I did not need to look up at the rest of her to know that she was blonde with severe cheekbones and red lips. I also knew that she was wearing a long black coat like the other two.

“Ms Dees,” I said and turned to her.

She smiled. It was the sort of dry, patient smile that the Aldermen tended to bestow on me, their unfortunate boss, all the time.

“I hear you are going on a trip,” she said. Beside me, Oda stiffened. She didn’t have her gun on her. She had left it at her place because, as she said, “It’s easier to buy a new gun in the United States than it is to stow one on a plane.”

“Yes, just a jaunt over the Atlantic,” I told the Alderman. “New scenery and all that.”

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with the walking dead man I have been hearing about, would it?”

“If he follows us, then I suppose it might.”

“So, the city is to be unprotected by its Midnight Mayor while you are away?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Talk to Penny.”

“Ms Ngwenya is not – ”

“Ms Dees,” we said and flashed her a wicked smile. “Must we repeat ourselves on that subject?”

She continued to smile, although it seemed to fade a little. “No, I suppose not,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“While you are away, the situation with the Order will be dealt with,” she continued.

“Are you going to send over a severe note concerning their behaviour and its consequences?”

“Decisions have been made concerning the fate of the one who resurrected this witch doctor.”

“I see,” I said. “And he’ll be an example for the Order? A ‘do this again and you’ll be next’ sort of thing?”

“Yes.”

“He or she will already be dead,” I pointed out. “The Order or the dead guy himself will have killed him or her.”

“We assume so, but it is best to be sure,” she said calmly.

“Of course.”

A girl tripped over a rolling suitcase. A man shouted about his freedoms and being searched. A woman in a grey suit sat on a bench and pressed her nose into a thin paperback bought in a gift shop.

Ms Dees said, “Goodbye, Mr Mayor.” She clicked-and-clacked away on her impressive heels and the two men followed. It made a very dramatic, Matrix-esque exit as their coats flapping when they walked. We were impressed.

“I’m surprised they haven’t killed you yet,” Oda said.

“It’s sort of in bad taste to kill your boss, I guess,” I said without looking at her.

“That never stopped them from trying before.”

“Thanks for that, Oda.”

She gave me something that might have been a small, strained smile. Or indigestion. Considering what she was eating, the latter seemed more likely.

 

The plane ride was long as hell. We were bored, antsy, and a little hyper on the sweets we had purchased while Oda wasn’t looking before boarding.

Speaking of our friendly assassin, she was blissfully asleep. She was stiff with her arms crossed and her head tipped back against the seat. I followed the fine line of musculature from her left shoulder, across her collarbone, and to the other shoulder. There was something very understated but profoundly strong about every aspect of her. It awakened something strange in the pit of my belly. We found it faintly nauseating and confusing.

By the time the lights had been dimmed inside the plane and most of the passengers had drifted to sleep, we had exhausted all options of entertainment. The in-flight movie was the latest James Bond flick, a confusing array of car chases and indecipherable plot but a Bond flick at least. That only lasted a few hours and the next one was some “uplifting” movie about sports that bored us.

We had purchased several different food packages – one was all dry crackers and cheese dips, while another consisted of tiny crumbly biscuits – and sampled them all. That left staring out the window at nothing or at our fellow passengers.

“Matthew,” Oda said.

We turned to her, tapping our fingers absently against the arm rest between us.

“Close your eyes,” she said and it wasn’t what you might think. It was all exasperation. “They’re glowing.”

“Oh.” I suppose the other passengers might find it strange in the semi-darkness. We complied with her order, although not without fixing her with a bright, blue-eyed look of utter cheerfulness. She rolled her eyes and went back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own _A Madness of Angels_ or _The Midnight Mayor_. Those are the creations of the wonderful Kate Griffin, aka Catherine Webb.


	4. Part III:   Deep and Profound and Bloody Moving

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a plan goes awry and, to everyone’s complete and utter mortification, a secret is revealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This chapter was not originally part of my plan for this story. In fact, this story was originally supposed to be fairly short and now it’s over 20,000 words. I’m not really sure how that happened, but I blame the blue electric angels. (Of course, Matthew says in The Midnight Mayor, “Sure. Blame the resurrection business. Go on. Why not? If in doubt [remind] a guy that he got killed.”) Poor Matthew. Things are never easy for him/them.

Atlanta was all jetlag and American Southern accents. We spent a few moments listening and trying to form the accent on our tongue until Oda pushed us out of the building, past rows of yellow and white taxi cabs and to the car rental area.

I watched her politely hand over her ID to the rental guy and receive the keys. “Have a good day, ma’am,” the gentleman in the t-shirt said and we were off to wherever Oda was going to take us. She wasn’t being very forthcoming with information and I had to concentrate on not paying attention to her driving.

“Is it even legal for you to drive here?” I hissed, as my fingers clung to the handle above the door.

She didn’t respond as she made a particularly terrifying turn around a corner and swerved around another driver.

“You know,” I said, “they drive on the other side of the road here.”

No verbal response, although she smirked. Loudly.

 

Savannah wasn’t quite like anywhere we had ever been. There was an atmosphere about the place. Whether it was truly haunted or not, people believed it was and that was enough. We eyed the Spanish moss, hanging limp and grey, reminding us of the hair of zombies or bloated corpses washed up on a shore somewhere.

The streets were tiny one-way affairs with big old houses with wrought iron railings lining double staircases and terraces. Some of the window shutters were brightly coloured in teal and salmon. Areas without houses were tiny squares with aged trees and bronze statures of war heroes.

In the middle of our examination of how the light made patterns in the grass of the parks through the trees, Oda practically manoeuvred the car onto the pavement and narrowly missed the big stone church sign on the corner. I just saved myself from hitting my head on the frame of the car door.

I assumed that the church was simply a physical representation of how large and in charge the parishioners considered their religion to be. With a tower featuring a proud, gleaming golden bell and a white front so pristine and free of wear or moss that our fingers itched for some graffiti, it was just slightly intimidating.

The fact that this was likely where Oda’s American Order contacts resided may have been a factor as well.

Just to be cautious, I gathered up a tiny charge as I walked the slower, more relaxed pace of people in Savannah, rather than the steady rush of a Londoner. The magic was old, vaguely creeping and tinged with the weight of the moist heat in the air. It was a Wednesday, a slow day at this church, and it allowed us to gaze at the grandeur of the inside without the chance of being jostled by a crowd.

Brilliant glass window faces stared down at us in judgement from gilded window frames. Shining golden chandeliers high above and candelabras on long tables along the walls lit up the path down the aisle and past the pews to a cross hanging with a Jesus at least eight feet high. There was a bald man kneeling on the steps beneath the cross in a black robe.

He seemed only to be praying, so we shifted our gaze back to the two stories of gold pillars around us, the Bibles tucked into the wooden pockets on the backs of the pews, and the giant organ tucked behind the cross.

Oda led the way. We treaded carefully, watching every shadow for witch doctors and religious fanatics that wanted to spill our blood. It had been a very long time since I had been in a church and we had never had the experience. This new experience felt… heavy, like we were being weighted down with Faith and Belief and other capitalizations.

The man stood up as we neared him. He paused to take in Oda’s bruised forehead and her dark grey clothing and my white “I Heart Zombies” t-shirt that I had bought on the way when she had stopped to buy a gun. I have no idea how she purchased one, nor do I want to. All I know is that it was at a bar right off the motorway that looked like one health violation away from closing down forever and one step removed from being a meth lab.

The priest’s polite job description won out in the end as he said, “Hello, friends.”

Oda stepped up to him and whispered something undoubtedly Latin, the language of choice for secret religious societies, I suppose.

“Domine dirige nos,” I muttered.

“You sound as if you’ve come a long way, friend,” the priest said to Oda. “Would either of you like tea?”

We perked up at the mention of a cuppa, and, despite her urgency, Oda acquiesced.

We were led to a back office that was so far removed from the golden glory of the church that it could have been in another time zone. It was dark and panelled in faded wood with water stains and a suspicious brown tile. We sat in front of the rickety wooden desk while the priest puttered around in a corner with a teapot.

“All I have at the moment is rooibos tea,” he explained, as he came over with a tea tray tipping precariously in his hands. The rose-patterned teapot clinked against a plain white teacup and two chipped blue ones, but all arrived safely on the desk.

The desk featured stacks of papers, an old desktop computer with a filthy screen that coughed with dust clogged in its fans, and a glass pear-shaped paperweight.

Oda refused the tea, but the priest poured us a cup and slid it across the desk. We sniffed the reddish amber liquid for a barely detectable herbs and fruit smell and then took a sip. It was everything the scent implied and the warmth soothed our nerves.

There was an awkward moment while we drank and Oda and the priest simply looked at each other. Oda’s stare was blank, but the priest smiled serenely and poured himself a cup while they studied one another.

Finally, he spoke. “I have heard of you,” he explained, as he sat back in his office chair and crossed his legs. “It is difficult not to, in fact. You have not crossed the ocean in a long time though. Why is that?”

“I was needed in Europe,” Oda stated.

“Eradicating sinners, I suppose. Am I right?” He raised his eyebrows at her and then grinned. “I was once an attack dog myself. I switched from hunting game to hunting sinners who tried to be above God Almighty.”

I stayed very still and pretended to drink more tea. There was a rifle in a case on the wall behind the priest, as well as a letter opener with a long blade and an emerald green handle near the edge of the desk on his side. Of course Oda would decide to go to an Order member like this.

“Has God given you a new mission?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Oda said and there was something strange about her voice, as she looked him straight in the eye. “And Matthew,” she paused and both of them looked at me, “is joining our ways.”

The priest smiled. “Well, we certainly need you. I assume you need a place to stay, so I offer you the church as your new home.”

“Thank you, father,” Oda said and silently kicked me when I opened my mouth to protest.

 

“Are you trying to get us killed?” I hissed that night as we sat on the back steps of the church in the damp heat.

Oda rolled her eyes. “Do you have to be so melodramatic?” she asked.

“Yes!” we said. “A psycho with a gun is providing us with housing. Do you not find that suspicious? As we have previously shown, we cannot dodge bullets!”

“Have a little faith.”

I snorted and hunched forward. I highly doubt it’s the kind of faith she meant, but I scattered pieces of paper with drawings of the London Underground symbol all around my bed when I went to sleep.

 

The morning presented us with tepid coffee that smelled faintly burnt but with fresh, warm pancakes smothered in butter and blueberry maple syrup. We joyfully devoured our food and temporarily forgot about imminent death.

The goddess who could destroy coffee but make glorious breakfast was the priest’s niece. She looked strikingly like him with watery blue eyes, dark hair that revealed itself to be brown in the sunlight, a freckled nose, and a pointed chin. She was also wearing long sleeves on a hot day in Georgia and did not make eye contact with anyone.

When Father Jacobs said, “Mary, more tea,” she scrambled up and left for the kitchen without a word. When he barked at her about sugar, she disappeared again.

However, she led polite conversation, all while staring at a spot out the window, and asked about my time a lifetime ago in New York and Chicago. I delighted in regaling her with tales of the food and sounds and hustle and bustle. I nearly let slip a story about a mugger in Chicago’s Grant Park who had the misfortune of attempting to rob a sorceress who went by the name of Quincy but quickly told her about the time Quincy and I had eaten chicken’s feet in Chinatown instead.

“Finally settling to do God’s work then, Matthew?” the priest asked.

I did not look at Oda, but I could feel her stare boring into the side of my skull. “As we all should,” I said in a properly reverent tone. However, I suspect that the smirk that I couldn’t quite contain ruined a little of the effect.

 

“You know what would make this whole business easier?” I remarked, as Oda did push-ups in the grass behind a shed beside the church, while I stood nearby. She grunted in response. “If you would teach me how to be a proper ridiculous nut job. Or, better yet, if you’d tell me what the plan is. You know?” She had disappeared for a few hours after breakfast to meet another Order member in town. When I had pointed out that maybe I should go too, she had actually laughed. Of course, it wasn’t a funny ha-ha laugh, but rather a dark, you-would-screw-this-up-if-I-let-you laugh.

“Matthew,” she’d said, probably because we had looked mutinous, “you have no concept of the intricacies of the interactions between Order members.”

“You mean, I don’t know any secret handshakes?”

“I mean, your sacrilegious hands have never touched a Bible, let alone opened one.” To my private amusement, she said sacrilegious in a completely nonjudgmental tone. It was more like how you would refer to a puppy who has pissed in your house.

“Fair enough.”

In the grass, Oda was on her millionth repetition. Or somewhere around there. She rolled her eyes and reached whatever count she was aiming for before she stopped and sat up.

“Sorcerer,” she said coldly, “the plan is simple. I am asking for an audience with people that are higher up than Chaigneau. If you so much as think a Satanic thought in front of these people, they will know.”

“Can I test that theory at least?”

Standing up, she started heading back towards the house. “Only if you want a bullet between your eyebrows,” she called back in a voice that was just loud enough for me to make out.

“Well, at least hear me out,” I said, as I caught up. “I don’t think we should be rooming with the Inquisition and his maybe-niece. While you were out – ” Oda glared at me as if to dare me to say I’d done something magical in the house of God. “ – I poked around the priest’s computer.”

“You did what?”

“He received an email with my picture the day we arrived.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“What?”

“The Order uses technology, Matthew. It’s not as if we can just tell a pigeon to go let the others know who to watch.”

“Was that actual humour?”

“No.”

“I thought so.”

“The point is that Father Jacobs knows exactly who we are,” she said. “He is just observing us to see if we have any Satanic attributes. This means that…”

“I should lay off the mystical?”

“That would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps watch your pronouns?”

“We will try,” we said and grinned.

 

Supper was chicken and mashed potatoes smothered in glorious gravy. We tried to act like a normal human being and not drool, but it was divine in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

We were brought abruptly out of our devotion to the food by our name. “Matthew, will you be joining Oda and myself at the meeting tonight?” It was Father Jacobs with his head bowed over his plate, hands crossed, but his eyes up and looking straight at us.

“We – ” we began and then swallowed our words back. “I didn’t think it would be proper. I’m very new to all this and – ”

“And what a good time to observe and learn!” he said enthusiastically.

And that is how we ended up going to a meeting of the Order.

 

Supper ended in silence. As soon as I was in my room, Oda was there right behind me, as silent as a viper. “There are rules tonight,” she hissed.

“I figured,” I said, sitting back on my bed. “I assume they include things like ‘Don’t speak unless spoken to. Don’t talk about magic. No funny business.’ That sort of thing.”

Oda smiled mockingly. “Good boy. And don’t wear that.”

I glanced down at my “Relax, I’m hilarious” t-shirt and said, “It’s a good conversational piece though. It’ll keep people from asking if I’m really a spawn of Satan in disguise. Besides, I blame you for my funny t-shirt collection. You donated the first one to the cause.”

“That ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ t-shirt was not meant to be funny.”

I snorted. “Right,” I said. “Well, maybe tonight we should have a secret signal if things start looking a bit dodgy.”

“I’ll pull out my gun.”

“That works. What should I do to let you know?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll know.”

We smirked. “This is going to be a fun evening,” I said.

 

The meeting was in an old two-story house by the Savannah River. Father Jacobs explained that it was close enough to the ocean that dolphins could be seen playing in the river sometimes. They would dance and leap in the waves kicked up by boats and chatter their songs. It was a dark, dark night, far enough outside the city for little light to reach us. The upstairs was completely deserted, but there was a light streaming through the windows on the main floor.

Oda kept her hands in the pockets of her jacket as if she were cold, but we knew it was a safety precaution – maybe even a comforting tick – as she wrapped her right hand around her gun. We wanted to gather up some power, but it would not have been subtle. The flickering of lights or the steady buzz of our skin would have given us away in this gloomy night. So we went forward and trusted that Oda would have our back.

Up two steps to a creaking porch with a rocking chair tucked into a corner under one of the light-filled windows. I couldn’t see inside because the curtains were drawn, but there was calm conversation going on within.

Father Jacobs knocked. An old man with a salt and pepper beard and a bald head answered. He was leaning on a wobbly cane, shaking just a little. He gave us a toothless grin and said, “Come in, come in.” We did not imagine his eyes on us for an abnormally long time.

We went directly into a giant sitting room with vaulted ceilings, multicoloured crackled glass vases and old books on the bookshelves around the room, and oak panelling. There was an open door diagonally across the room that seemed to lead into a kitchen where we could just make out an island and a stove. Nestled into a giant lemon yellow sofa was a wrinkled old woman in an orange dress that went down to just above her bony ankles. Below was a pair of clunky white orthopaedic trainers and woolly socks. She unrolled herself from the chair and limped over to us.

“Matthew,” said Father Jacobs. “This is Miranda. The fellow who opened the door for us is Edgar.”

I made pleasantries and accepted a helping from a tray of mini hot dogs that Edgar shoved under our nose. I had seen enough movies to be suspicious of even the most innocent of hors d’oeuvres and discretely tossed the hot dogs into a rubbish bin by the coffee table.

“Come and sit with me, Matthew,” said Miranda as she collapsed back down onto a sofa.

I complied and kept one eye on Oda, who was talking quietly to Edgar. Father Jacobs was doing a decent impression of a disapproving father and staring at me. I turned away and tried to catch back up with whatever Miranda was talking about.

“You’re from London?” she was asking.

“Yes.”

“And what did you do over there before you came to the Order?”

“I was a cleaner,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I had been a cleaner before meeting the Order. Not right before, but before all the same.

“I see,” she said. I had a feeling that she owned this grand old place and that her life came with a lot of old money. The thought of cleaning other people’s garbage was simply unthinkable. That I suspected that she also knew that I was a sorcerer did not help my case any.

A phone rang. Our eyes immediately swivelled to the source, a mobile sitting on the coffee table. Edgar answered.

“Yes, they’re here,” he said in answer to some question.

Oda and I made very brief eye contact.

“The call’s for you,” said Edgar. I walked over to him so that he wouldn’t have to hobble over to me and waited for the other shoe to drop.

 

Feeling the plastic brush the deep scars in my palm, I held the phone up to my ear. “Hello?”

“Matthew.” It was a jovial tone coming from a big man across thousands of miles of ocean.

“Sinclair,” I said.

“I trust that you’re well?”

“Wonderful. We’re used to people trying to spill our blood.”

“How… unfortunate, but I have good news.”

We waited in silence. Oda was staring at us with something like grim acceptance. It pulled at her face and gathered her tension into lines on her forehead.

“The Order has agreed to make a deal with the Aldermen,” Sinclair continued when I said nothing.

“Hmm.”

“They will let you go and return to London unharmed.”

“Really now?” I said and I smiled. I couldn’t really help it. Knowing what was coming, we wanted to laugh. When he didn’t give me any specifics, I asked, “And what of Oda? Safe passage as well?”

There was a delicate pause. “No,” he said finally. “She must remain in the custody of the American Order members you see before you.” Polite speak for ‘not our problem.’

“That is unfortunate,” I sighed. “And the witch doctor?”

“He will be caught and dispatched by the American Order.”

“Oh good. All of the loose ends tied up into a nice little bow. My apologies for wrecking your orderly plan.”

“Matthew – ”

I did not hear the rest of what the concerned citizen had to say. I flipped the mobile shut with a little snap of plastic on plastic and handed it back to Edgar.

“Now,” we said with a tone that could just barely be called civil, and, if everyone wasn’t already looking at us, they were now. “Let me start out by saying that it has been a very bad week for us and, if any one of you makes any sudden movements, we will not hesitate to use force. That’s sorcerer-speak for blowing shit up, in case any of you don’t understand.” We shifted closer to Oda, who was eyeing us like we’d grown another head.

“Oda and I are going to leave this place unharmed,” we continued.

“Are you now?” It was Father Jacobs. The only one stupid enough to block the front door but also the only one carrying a rifle, so perhaps not so stupid. We were, after all, not bullet-proof.

“Daniel!” Miranda yelled at Father Jacobs. “We agreed to leave the sorcerer to the Order in London.”

“You haven’t been around them, Miranda,” the priest said. “He’s practically Oda’s pet. He won’t leave her.”

“Hey now,” I grunted, even as I backed even nearer to Oda while they were distracted. “Just because I’m a decent human being who won’t abandon his friends does not, in fact, mean that I’m anyone’s pet.”

“No,” Oda whispered. “It just means that you’re a fool.”

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. “You are definitely the best friend a sorcerer could ever have,” I said.

“Probably has something to do with how un-killable I am,” she said, as our shoulders brushed.

“That’s true. It’s not like I have many options.”

I heard that unmistakable click of her gun. In the next instant, I stole all of the lights. We ducked as one. She grabbed my right hand with her left and pulled me towards the kitchen. Our fingers threaded together without thought and we dashed through the darkness. Back door. Please let there be a… _back door!_

My left hand found it, flipped the lock, and yanked it open. We dragged each other out the door and off into the night.

 

In the faint sliver of moonlight, Oda dropped our hand and we ran towards the water. I wasn’t really sure what we were going to do when we got there, but hitching a ride on a dolphin’s back seemed unlikely.

We were not even halfway to the river when someone spoke.

“S-Stop.” A frightened, quivering voice coming out of a vaguely woman-shaped shadow. Behind us, there were shouts.

“Mary?” I asked. She lit a torch and shone it at our feet.

“I said stop,” she said in a stronger voice.

“We can’t really do that,” Oda said darkly.

“I don’t think you have a choice,” Mary explained. Her other hand, the one without the torch, was now clearly revealed as possessing a gun. It was aimed somewhere between Oda and myself. “He said I had to stop you if you tried to escape.”

“I don’t think you know who you’re up against,” said Oda.

“And I don’t think you do either!” Mary snarled and jerked the gun towards Oda. Oda and I stood, breath coming out in panicked gasps, the adrenaline flooding everything, sharpening our senses.

“Mary,” we said and were surprised to realize that we were shaking too.

Pleaseplease _please_. We didn’t want to die.

Stop it.

 _No, no. Death. The end of everything. End of the line._

I took several deep breaths and tried to calm us down. “Mary,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.” What was that psychology bullshit? Wasn’t I supposed to pretend to figure out what she was feeling?

Never much for words, Oda took action. As she went to raise her gun, I guess she expected Mary to back down.

Unfortunately, that is not what happened. In something like a tenth of a second, Mary pulled the trigger. There was a familiar _boom_ but no pain. However, Oda let out a little hiss between her clenched teeth and nearly dropped her gun. Instead, she jolted to the left and banged her shoulder into mine.

I was startled. We both went down and Mary stepped closer, gun out and quaking so much that I was afraid she would set it off on accident. Eyes wide, I stared up at her, while Oda muttered in another language, or rather two other languages (one was more than likely Latin and Biblical while the other was probably her native tongue).

“Are you done fighting me?” Mary asked.

When she got close enough, I kicked out at her legs, sending her crashing to the ground with a surprised squeak. In the momentary confusion, I smacked her gun out of her hands, grabbed Oda by the shoulders, and pulled us both up.

I led the way down to the water and was rewarded with the sight of a tiny dock with an equally tiny motorboat tied to it. Oda lurched clumsily into the boat and I grabbed the back of her jacket to keep her from falling overboard. I untied the boat while she pulled on the cord until the engine turned over.

Indistinct shapes appeared at the dock as we pulled away, but I gunned the engine and not a shot hit us.

 

It was a long time before either of us said anything. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe an hour. I had no idea. I gave us faint light with the electricity I had stolen from the house and steered. At the same time, Oda set her gun on the bottom of the boat and stripped off her jacket. When she peeled the bottom of her bloody t-shirt up a little, I could just make out an angry streak of red flesh along her side in the light from my tiny light globe.

Without a word, I pulled my “Relax, I’m hilarious” t-shirt over my head and handed it to her. She stared at it and then at my face. Finally, she took it and pressed it into the wound.

“Just think,” I said, shivering without a shirt. “If we were taking the rental car and not this boat, you’d have to kiss your rental car security deposit goodbye.”

To my complete and utter surprise, she laughed and then choked, gasping. There was something vaguely hysterical about her body language, like she would fall to pieces at any moment.

“Sorry,” I said. “That probably hurt.”

She rolled her eyes and croaked, “Your power of stating the obvious is still strong.”

“What can I say? It’s a gift.”

“Or a curse,” she sighed.

“What’s the plan now?” I asked.

She stared out at the water. “Medical supplies. More travelling. Do you know anyone who could help us in this country? I’m rather limited in contacts now.”

“You’re willing to ask magicians for help?”

“I guess I have to.”

“Then, I know just the person.”

 

More silence. My formerly white t-shirt turned dark red at an alarming rate, but I didn’t suggest actual medical attention. It wouldn’t have been met with any gratitude.

In the back of my mind, something was niggling at me. It was a constant annoyance that kept burrowing into my thoughts.

“You really thought I was just going to walk back there, didn’t you?” I blurted out.

Oda was staring out at Savannah at night. We passed under a giant lighted bridge made of hundreds of white wires, rode by boats and twinkling city lights. I didn’t think she was going to answer and started to get very, very angry. It surprised me a little. I wanted very much to blow something up.

“It would have been the smart thing to do,” she said finally. It was the final spark on the limited control I had on my temper.

 _Boom_. I rounded on her, leaning forward so that our faces were only six or seven inches apart. “Yes, tactically, sure,” I said. “When it comes to self-preservation, likely, although I have my doubts that I would have made it to the airport, let alone across the Atlantic, without an accident ending my existence. And yet I didn’t say, ‘Oh, sure. Take out your religious justice on this woman, Order!’ Why? Because we’ve been doing this crazy adventure shit for a long time and this one is even crazier than normal because it’s so personal. Haven’t you noticed that at no point did I have to help you in this? Really, truly, I didn’t.”

“I held a gun to your head and made you take me to the Neon Court,” she pointed out, glaring at me with such defensiveness that I laughed.

“You think I couldn’t have led you on a merry dance across London? ‘Oh, I was sure the Neon Court would be here. Why don’t we try this night club instead?’ I could have done that for ages until I gave you the slip. Do you think I couldn’t have escaped from the Order? Actually… truth be told, probably not, but I certainly could have escaped from you after you released me, especially considering I’m the Midnight Fucking Mayor and the Aldermen would have come for me. Not willingly, but it’s their job.”

“You’re reckless,” she said. “A complete and total idiot. Your noble spirit or chivalry or whatever you wish to call it is going to get you killed!”

“We are not so easy to kill anymore,” we said and smirked at her.

“Brash and foolish,” she barked.

“Oda,” I said more softly. “I would not have left you back there. Just as you wouldn’t have left me either.”

“I let the Order lock you up for five days,” she growled.

“But you released me, despite the fact that you had to know that you’d be named a traitor.”

“Shut up!”

I cut the engine and just let us float. “Why? Maybe if I knew why you did it, I would stop asking. It can’t be just because they resurrected your brother. Maybe if you needed me to kill him, sure, but you probably could have gotten the Order to let me go to do that eventually.”

“I – ” she began and stopped. We both watched each other, assessing the other for weakness. I was going to win. While I was merely earnest, she was cracking with pain and fatigue and confusion. Anger could only fuel her for so long.

“Friends don’t let friends get killed,” I pointed out quietly when she still didn’t break. “And you are… more than a friend to me.”

Neither of us breathed. I was so shocked by what had come out of my own mouth that I almost blamed us. Her face was damp with perspiration; mine was flushed. She had mostly stopped bleeding into my shirt, but she still had the fabric pressed to her wound to keep the bullet’s shallow trail from opening up again.

After a long, terrified moment, “I freed you so that you could help me stop my brother” is what she said in a low, tired voice.

I nodded numbly, not looking at her. There was something going on in my chest, a tightening pain that made it difficult to inhale.

It is amazing how something as supposedly deep and profound and bloody moving as love can crush one so devastatingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think of this. :)


	5. Part IV:  Flesh of My Flesh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the witch doctor rejoins the chase and a sorcerer has to branch out into a different sort of magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been written for close to 7 months now so it is such a relief to finally put it out there. Do let me know what you think of it and the story thus far.

I slept through most of the bus ride from Savannah to Chicago and tried not to remember what I had said two nights before.

At three in the morning after our trip on the Savannah River, we had abandoned the boat and silently trudged to a store open twenty-four hours. Since I was shirtless and the sign on the door was adamant about No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service, Oda covered up her bloody clothes with her jacket and went inside. I stood in the alley and tried very hard not to be noticed in my current state, but no one passed at that hour. She came out with a small travel first-aid kit, an extra roll of gauze, and a t-shirt that proclaimed “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.” We barked out a laugh at the sight but Oda did not meet our eyes.

A day in a shady motel room had passed without incident while Oda took care of her side and I occasionally left to get food. Neither of us had spoken since that night, except to talk about where we were going.

Much of the terrain outside the bus windows was a dull monotony of trees and mountains that were beautiful in their own right, but not powerful to me. When our surroundings switched to corn and soy fields, Oda smiled at my grumbling.

“This isn’t funny,” I hissed in a whisper. On the coach bus, I had to lean close to her to make sure no one overheard. If, that is, anyone could possibly hear above the eighty-year-old man with the drawling accent of the American South who was snoring so loud that I could not hear the bus radio. “You may have an unlimited supply of ammunition somehow hidden on you, but I can’t do much if there isn’t a damn main line anywhere for miles!”

“Testy, sorcerer?” Oda asked in a bored tone. The smile was still hovering at her lips, like a taunt. I was bent over so close to her that I could see the mottled colour of the burn above her eye, individual strands in the tight curls of her hair, and the smoothness of the skin at her throat. Warmth spread across my face and my mouth went dry.

“Not testy,” I grunted as I tried to mask my reaction to her. “Fucking irritable.”

She looked prepared to say something, but a voice over the loudspeaker informed us that we were stopping for food in McLean, Illinois.

McLean possessed a gas station that claimed it had the Best Pizza in Town so naturally we had to try it, although we were almost positive that there was no alterative pizza place there. A quick survey of the area revealed nothing but field, a house or two, the ubiquitous McDonald’s, and motorway for as far as I could see. Oda spent the break cleaning her gun behind the gas station as if she had not done so for every leg of our trip. I huddled against the brick wall behind her and felt the magic of the motorway through my veins – always moving, ever flowing.

 

The coach broke down in the middle of Nowhere. It made a horrible wounded animal sound and died on the side of the road on a motorway in the dark among the cornfields, waking me up with a jerk as my head smacked against the window.

We sat bolt upright and listened. Oda watched us.

A low buzzing static in the air alerted me to unfamiliar, thick, earthy magic like lightning gathering in the clouds. I swore under my breath. “What?” she asked. Her right hand was already at the comforting bulge in her jacket.

I heard a whining sound getting closer and closer. “Give me your hand,” I said.

“What?”

“Your hand!” I hissed and snatched her left one up and leaned away from the window. That was when all hell broke loose and something struck the glass so hard that it shattered and the side of the bus buckled inward and my forehead cracked into Oda’s and she grabbed onto me with both arms as we went flying out of our seats as the bus tipped over and we tumbled around and around and –

Screams and cries and confusion, and all I knew for certain was that Oda was in my arms with her face pressed into my shirt.

 

When everything settled, I found myself lying on top of Oda with my hands fisted tightly in the back of her jacket. One of the hands had been cut on the glass and was stinging steadily. The other one had gone numb. I coughed and gasped, “Oda?” into her neck.

When I lifted up my head, she was staring at a spot above us with a mildly glazed look on her face and a bloody head wound that I couldn’t be sure was serious or not. It was too dark and there was glass and broken seats everywhere. I heard several people crying out for each other far off in another world.

“Oda?” I repeated.

She nodded and made eye contact. “Explain to me what just happened, sorcerer,” she said calmly.

“I believe the old prance-about-the-fields type of magicians would call it ‘raising a wind,’” I explained. Despite the pain in various parts of my body, I was becoming uncomfortably aware of Oda crushed underneath me and squirmed when she moved to adjust the gun in her pocket that had been stabbing both of us in the solar plexus. “Natural elements were always big. Let’s manipulate Mother Nature for shits and giggles. It’s just another point of view.”

“Of course,” she said dryly and attempting to push me off of her. I obliged, sitting back on my legs and trying to get my bearings. We were actually lying on the smashed remains of our original side of the coach with no windows and the seats mangled around us. I helped a little girl, looking ill and frightened, out from under a pile of seats. She crawled over to her mother, who was bleeding steadily out of her arm, and cried. The man with them, the father maybe, looked unconscious or dead. We looked away.

“Your brother… Are you ready?” I asked Oda.

“We’ll find out,” she said and offered me her hand to pull me up. I did and wobbled to my feet with the glass crunching underneath and a sharp pain in my leg.

“Oh hell.”

She looked at the big gash in my right shin and said, “You’ll live. I would patch you up now, but you’d only tear any stitches.”

“Ha-ha.”

We edged out of that place by going out the other side, popping up on the new roof of the bus, and crawling down what had once been the old roof. All of the windows were broken so that every inch of my exposed skin felt cut and scraped before we were free. Oda was favouring her left arm and her side was visibly bleeding again, but of course she did not remark on it. On solid ground, the earth was hard and unforgiving under our feet.

We listened and watched. The air was thick with the moist humidity that preceded a storm. No farm or store in sight meant that there was very little that we could make out in the dark, but there was the steady sound of someone walking towards us that caused Oda to take out her gun.

“Anything useful for you around here?” she asked. I heard the almost reassuring clicks of her unpacking bullets and loading her weapon.

“No power for miles,” I muttered. “But…” I gazed thoughtfully up at a crackle of lightning in the clouds above.

The light revealed a figure on the other side of the motorway in a red robe. The way he grinned at us reminded me frighteningly of Hunger.

“Never a dull moment,” I said, and then in a more serious tone, I added, “We need to get away from the bus.”

She nodded once. There were too many people around and many of them were hurt or possibly dead, and I didn’t even have a bleeding incandescent lamp to leech even the tiniest bit of power. I grabbed a big dented piece of metal that had once been attached to the side of the bus, and we walked across the five bare lanes of motorway to meet him.

Oda’s brother sniffed the air. “You bleed, sorcerer,” he said. “I have heard interesting tales of your blood.”

“I’m not really in a giving mood at the moment.”

“No matter. I can take it from you after I drink Sister’s.”

Oda jerked and fired a shot straight at his heart. Her brother stumbled back as the bullet penetrated but it was mostly in surprise. Grinning ear to ear as the bullet slipped back out of his chest, he said, “Why, Sister, what a greeting in this strange country.”

Oda said something in that other language that was not Latin that sounded like it may have been an oath and spit on the ground.

“By the way,” Oda’s brother said, “I have brought others with me here today.”

In the darkness, I heard something else and looked around fruitlessly. Another lightning bolt illuminated the night and revealed the two figures behind him.

I heard Oda’s sharp intake of breath.

“A family reunion today,” said her brother with an expansive opening of his arms. Lightning crackled again and I got a better look at the figures’ faces. Two girls, one perhaps eleven and the other no older than nine, stood small and dead-eyed in ragged shirts that were so big that they reached their knees. Their chocolate-coloured skin was hanging off of their frames in patches, as if it was peeling away. It reminded me of old chocolate; how it turns whitish with age and dries out.

Despite her status as the psycho-bitch, I knew better than to expect even Oda to react when they attacked in this situation.

“Get back!” we yelled and shoved her behind us. Both little girls sprang forward with nails aimed at our eyeballs and decaying gums flapping. I used the piece of the coach to smack both of them away. The older girl leapt straight at us again and took the metal piece in her mouth and tore it from my hands.

I swore and scrambled away from them. Pushing Oda further back, I lifted up a forearm to shield my face. I heard Oda trip and fall backwards, but I was busy with the minor problem of the other girl latching onto my raised left arm with her teeth.

A gunshot rang out again. This time a reassuringly accurate one from behind me and angling up at the girl formerly attached to my skin. The little girl sprang back with blood on her teeth and dribbling down her chin. There was two half-moon slices of teeth marks on my wrist that stung worse than my leg now. I was reminded of films on zombies and grinned a little at the thought of infection.

I reached back and helped Oda to stand. She took my helping hand without comment, although her fingers slid in the blood that trickled down and into my palm.

 _My blood on her hands,_ I thought in a vague sort of half-formed way.

The girls attacked again, but this time Oda did not hesitate to fire repeated shots at their hearts, kneecaps, and faces. She paused to reload and I side-stepped and kicked out at the older girl when she aimed herself at my chest. She scrambled back on all fours and dove at Oda’s knees, just as the little girl did the same.

Oda let out a barrage of shots, but the girls had become used to the bullets as only the dead can. Without thinking, we plucked a little power from the clouds, pulling it down in a stream of thin lightning like a kite string curling down from the sky, and, knitting my fingers together, aimed the charge at the little dead girls with a hiss of pain escaping our lips. It was hotter and fiercer stuff than we had ever handled before. Even that one little sip we had drunk from the sky was stronger than the live rail and ten times more addictive to our senses.

Both girls were thrown back so hard that they hit the dirt with a sickening snap of spinal cord. The clouds overhead were agitated, either by our daring or by the gathering of a storm, because everything was lightening to a purplish grey. I ignored Oda’s eyes on me, as I tried to catch my breath.

“How adaptive you are, sorcerer,” said her brother in that sing-song voice.

“Point of view,” I grunted.

Both girls staggered to their feet, but their necks were kinked at odd angles and they jerked continually as if the electricity was still bouncing around their bodies. “You’ve broken them,” Oda’s brother sighed. “My poor little sisters.”

Oda snarled something in another tongue and fired at him again. It was entirely irrational; a complete waste of ammo, but I knew from her face that she was not thinking at all.

“Oda, don’t – ” Before I could stop her, her brother was at her side in half a breath, one hand curled around her throat. She aimed at his stomach and fired again, but, even at close range, it was no use.

“Oda!” I yelled but stumbled to the side before I could reach her as her dead sisters sprang at me with teeth and nails.

A spasm as Oda’s fingers threatened to drop her gun. Our eyes widening as we struck out at one girl and the other sunk her teeth into our shoulder. Blood was flowing hot and thick out of the circles of nasty bite marks all over our arms. One of the girls, she was so close I could see the wispy dark hair on her head falling out as we struggled, tore a strip of our flesh from our arm, just below the elbow.

Oda gasped and released the gun in order to use both of her hands to struggle to force her brother’s hand from her neck. He used his other one, the one that had been just casually resting at his side as he squeezed the life out of Oda with the other, to bend her left wrist back until it made a sickening snap. Her eyes went wide and afraid, but she did not give up and neither would we.

We screamed.

Our blue blood ignited into a blue electric fire that called the lightning down from above to come crashing upon the girls and Oda’s brother. He was thrown back from her as the blood on Oda’s right hand, the one that had latched onto mine, burst into a blue that did not harm her.

The decaying skin of the girls sizzled where they had landed and filled the air with the scent of burning flesh. Thankfully, they did not get up again.

Oda crumpled to the ground and panted, as she rubbed her neck where fingers had left bruised indentations. Our burning blood had burnt away, but she stared at her hand in wonder. We stood up very calmly and siphoned more lightning down to flood our body with white and blue that filled our sight and brightened our surroundings.

And, as our skin crackled with a ferocious natural magic that was so potent that, as we walked, it made the ground hiss under our feet, we waited for Oda’s brother to attack again.

He did not disappoint. He let out a laugh as he rearranged his robe. “You seem to have taken to my point of view, sorcerer,” he said.

“Not so much,” we hissed. “There is a difference between us and your abuse of magic. Life is magic. No matter where it comes from.”

“How is your resurrection any different than what I do?” he asked and got to his feet.

“You do not deal in life. You are all about death and watching it cater to your whims. We love life, but we did not ask to return to life in the first place. That was the desire of others.”

“Naïve sentiments. Death is a very potent kind of magic.”

We shook our head. Laughing, he launched a wind at us that caused us to dive out of the way. The air crackled and we felt like flying because we were

 _I was_

so alive and so untameable,

like the nature we were playing with, like a Category Five hurricane against a city was the same as a Category Five hurricane against a mud hut.

Blue light poured out of our skin and mixed with the white lightning and blazed together and we screamed and screamed.

Oda’s brother lashed at us with wind and his own lightning, but he did not have our skill with electricity. His dark blood coated his shirt and sprang up on his face and we laughed.

We were light, we were fire, we were life…

We wrestled for control of the lightning, struggling in the dirt and striking out with power and fists. He dug his fingers into the place on our arm where skin had been torn away by one of the little dead girls’ teeth and stuck them into his mouth to lick the blood, and we laughed with the exhilaration of the pain.

“Matthew!”

Oda’s voice. Reassuring and close, like a lifeline in a storm.

But I could not totally stop us from going boom and I looked at her once, over her brother’s shoulder and then tightly shut my eyes as the world exploded into fire.

 

My vision was tinted the blue of our blood and white like lightning even after everything had settled. We were lying on our side in a pool of blood that was ordinary and red and partly mine. I shifted to all fours and saw the bloody mass that had once called itself Oda’s brother.

Shuddering with the effort, I fisted the dirt and fought to control us even as we pleaded for release.

“Matthew?”

“It’s so easy for a sorcerer to go mad,” I muttered through my teeth as sparks travelled down my arms and into the ground and my hair stood on end and we wanted to let everything crackle and ignite; to feel that strange, foreign high of natural electricity again.

The click of Oda’s gun. “Matthew.”

“No need for that,” I said and looked up at her. I have no idea what she saw, but it probably wasn’t to my credit. She aimed the gun at the centre of my forehead and paused.

“I’m fine,” I insisted, although my voice was up half an octave and breaking.

“You’re really not.” Her gun did not waver.

“Just give me a moment,” I pleaded and shook. With a cry, I ducked my head and vomited.

To my infinite surprise, I heard the gentle plop of the gun falling to the dirt and her kneeling down beside me. My head snapped up and I watched her bring her empty hand towards me.

“Wait,” we said and breathed out slowly. As we did, the last of the charge released into the earth and the bluish white faded to a muted grey. “Okay,” I muttered and sagged. She gathered me in and settled her chin on my shoulder. I let out a little sigh when she rested her hand at the back of my head and threaded her fingers through my hair. Feeling suddenly steady and warm, I brought my arms around her.

“Matthew?”

“Mmhmm?” I said with my eyes closed.

“You are very lucky.”

I chuckled. “I beg to differ, unless you mean I’m lucky in that you haven’t shot me yet. Then, yeah, I know.”

“Silly man.”

I laughed again. We were calm, and I was sure of myself. Maybe I was still a little bit mad because I said, “You won’t shoot me.”

“Ah, there’s the arrogance of the spawn of Satan,” she said dryly.

“I mean it,” I said and yawned loudly, allowing my jaw to crack in the process. I pressed my body in closer to her, ignoring all of the pain in my limbs where the skin was gone. “You won’t ever…”

She stiffened, and I was afraid she would pull away and we would be cold again. “Don’t be so sure,” she finally said although there was no conviction behind it.

I fell asleep. She could have put a bullet in my brain and we wouldn’t have cared. I had no such fears though.

 

In the morning, I wasn’t sure if how I felt was closer to the effects of a hangover or serious illness. My head felt foggy and leaden and the daylight looked strange. Cheek pressed into the dirt, I breathed in the blasted rural air and grimaced.

“Fucking hell,” I grunted when I sat up and the world spun. I brought my knees up and tucked my head between them to keep from vomiting.

“Feeling the effects of your sins?” Oda asked somewhere behind me.

I foolishly whipped around to glare at her. “My Satanic inclinations fucking saved both of us back – ” I stopped mid-tirade when she appeared merely amused by my anger. “Oh. You were displaying that infamous Oda sense of humour again.”

“It does exist,” she said. “By the way, help arrived for the coach, but I decided it would be better if we disappeared.”

“Wonderful. I just love the bloody countryside.” I examined our surroundings and realized we were in a ditch hidden by shrubbery. “Did you carry me?” I had seen her biceps before and knew she could do it.

She shrugged. “You were dead weight, and it’s not as if I don’t work out. It is very easy to carry something so scrawny.”

My frown deepened. Why did everyone feel it necessary to comment on my appearance?

“Let me look at your leg and arms,” she said. I noticed without much astonishment that she had retrieved our newest bags of supplies. She rummaged through hers for the first-aid kit and came back to my side with the small white box.

Kneeling down beside me, she snapped open the case and pulled out gauze, tape, and a disinfectant spray that claimed it did not sting. Lies.

I didn’t realize that my leg still hurt until after she peeled up one leg of my trousers and some of the dried bloody fabric stuck to the gash in my shin.

“I’m beginning to wonder if your so-called ‘almost perfect resurrection,’” she said the last bit with some distaste, “means that you returned easily breakable.”

“I’m not going to lie, I was beginning to wonder that myself,” I said and winced as she sprayed a liberal amount of disinfectant on the wound.

“Or maybe you were always so soft.”

“Dunno. I wasn’t routinely threatened before. I will even go so far as to admit that I led a fairly dull life in comparison. It was nice.”

She dabbed at the blood with an absorbent pad and wrapped thick, fresh gauze around my leg and the pad several times over. “Do you regret being resurrected?” she asked without meeting my eyes.

“Now we’re getting into the deep questions,” I muttered. I thought about the answer so long that she obviously didn’t expect one.

“This life is fascinating,” we said. “It is both wondrous and frightening in all of its sensations and glory. We would not have it any other way now.”

She met our eyes, but we could not tell what she was thinking. I said, “Life is magic; all of it,” and shrugged.

She switched her attention to my arms, which, I realized with some alarm, were really badly off. It looked a bit like a vicious dog had pretended I was a chew toy from the bite marks and bits of skin missing from them. My skin looked purple with bruises and smears of blood.

I bit back a curse when she applied disinfectant to the really bad part below my elbow. Instead, I focused my attention on her. Her knees were muddy and there were fresh purple bruises around her throat, a nasty cut above her eye, and blood, mostly mine, soaking the front of her shirt with just a little of her own on her reopened side. The hands wrapping gauze around my arms were darker than normal with blood and dirt encrusted under the nails.

Somehow, using mostly her hands, she had buried her siblings in the mud.

When we made eye contact again, I realized that, despite her stoic expression, her eyes were so red and her face so obviously tear-streaked through the dirt that I wanted to hold her in the same way she had done for me the night before, but she would not have appreciated it.

Instead, I said, “They weren’t really your sisters.”

She snorted angrily. “I know that – ”

“No, I mean, they weren’t even their bodies. Dirt – ashes to ashes, dust to dust – made to look like them probably because he – he felt like bringing your family together again. But they weren’t. They’re still buried wherever they were years ago.”

She looked at her hands, all caked and splattered with mud, and said, “Thank you.”

I reached around her and grabbed the roll of gauze. “Your wrist?” I asked and she volunteered her broken left wrist without a word.

 

We hitchhiked up Illinois. Mostly this involved walking because most people in this day and age do not stop for the random stranger on the road. Our appearance didn’t help much either. Both of my arms under my t-shirt were wrapped tight with gauze and the blood and bruises on both of us were frightening. Oda was able to flip up the collar of her leather coat and zip up her jacket to hide the worse of the mess, but I was rather a lost cause.

The first night, we slept on the side of the road in a ditch. Oda permitted us to sleep back-to-back only because it was cold when the sun went down and she was annoyed with my shivers and complaints.

The second was spent in a seedy motel with one bed. Oda slept under the covers while I refused to on the grounds that no one would choose that shade of yellowish brown for the sheets in the first place. No, it had to be a stain of some kind and my skin crawled just considering the possible stories the room could tell us. There was a foul magic about hotels. Sinister and nasty. Illicit and discreet.

Oda cleaned out the marks on my arms every night with the calm mothering that I had come to expect from her. She would trace the curve of my elbow with the surprisingly feather light touch that piqued my awareness. Sometimes, she would catch my look and her eyes would widen. She did not allow us to help her bandage her side.

A day later, when we were checking into another questionable establishment, the man behind the front desk with the open bottle of booze at his elbow leered at Oda in such a way and said such insinuating things that I did a very stereotypically male thing and took a step closer to the desk to stare down at him.

“Is there a problem?” he asked with a grin that said he very much hoped there was.

“Yes, I take offense to your piss poor representation of the male gender.”

“Little man, you really think it’s fuckin’ wise to defend the honour of your whore in front of me?” He stood up very calmly to reveal a midsection three times wider than two of me and a considerable height advantage.

Still, we grinned, leaning our elbows on the counter to show-off our heavily bandaged arms and said, “We have taken on things that would fill your nightmares, seen horrors of bloodlust and power hunger that would fill even you with terror.” He looked distinctly uncomfortable all of a sudden – perhaps it was our eyes, which we could see reflected in the mirror behind him looking unnaturally bright and bloodshot, or Oda’s right hand, which had strayed to the pocket where her gun hid – and took a step back.

“Besides,” I said in a friendly voice. “I don’t think she needs anyone to defend her honour. She would just happily shoot you in your favourite appendage. Keys to our room, if you would be so kind?”

He did just that and stared after us. Oda said nothing until we were in the room.

“Who was more annoyed with him for being a pig? You or the angels?”

I gingerly poked the ugly carpeting with my toe for anything openly suspicious before slipping my shoes off. “We are annoyed with his arrogance and sense of self-importance. I, as you keep implying, am becoming more and more reckless around you.”

“Indeed?” she said. It was an open question complete with a raise of an eyebrow. It held the same dawning revelation in her eyes that I had seen before when she realized that I couldn’t – wouldn’t kill Penny.

“Yes,” I said and waved my hands vaguely around in an attempt to describe our situation. Nothing really seemed to quite explain it properly though.

“Because you were such a picture of rationality before meeting me,” she said dryly.

I sighed and turned towards the dirty window and a wall with a suspicious dark stain. “Forget I said anything.”

“What are you – ”

I turned around to face her again and said in a tight, exhausted voice, “I have said all I am going to say about the subject of you and myself, Oda. I’d like to think we’re at least friends though. I should say we’ve survived enough together to allow me to presume that we’re more than acquaintances.”

It was like I had said something profane. “We are not friends,” she said with her face scrunched up in anger and a little confusion. “We are not anything more than that either. Do not think for one moment that you know anything about me.”

“Oh really?” I snarled and laughed mockingly at the hand that shifted towards the front pocket of her coat. The sting of the wall between us was so painful that I nearly sagged in defeat, but something drove me forward. “You enjoy action movies, don’t think I haven’t noticed you pausing on certain movies when we have motel TVs to watch, and I bet you have all of the really cliché quotes memorized somewhere in there; you just won’t admit it. You don’t like magic because you fear what it may be able to do, so you have taken certain steps against it, like a child has a light at night to keep the bad monsters away.

“You loved those two little girls, the real ones, so much that you could not bear their deaths. That is why you understood us when we were so devastated and unmoveable when Dana died. Because once upon a time, you locked yourself up in this façade, this psycho-bitch façade, where no one can enter and you pretend that because I am a sorcerer, because we are me, that I, _I_ most of all, most definitely cannot enter, but that is a lie!”

She unzipped her pocket and pulled out her gun, but I continued on anyway.

“It’s a lie!” I insisted and stepped forward just a tiny bit. “You aren’t afraid of this because I use magic, although your brother was a psychopath who got eaten up by his own greed and ambition, but I will not. If you were afraid of that, you would have let the Order murder me or you would have done it yourself a million times over! Even when I think I might go mad with blue fire, you have seen me pull it all back in, so you know that you’re safe from that. That’s why you did not shoot us when we were buzzing with the magic of lightning. You made it so much easier though. Don’t you get that? You reached out to me when I needed you because you know me as well as I know you!”

“You are an abomination,” she said, as she cocked the gun at my chest. Her hands were shaking; there was fear in her eyes, like the rest of her would start shaking at any moment and she would shake until she crumbled away.

“I will admit to being a little bit of one because of us,” I said in a softer tone and took another step forward with my hands out in placation. One stupid, stubborn part of me made me say, “Oda, there is nothing to be afraid of, except normal relationship woes and I swear I will never betray you or any of that.”

She paused for about two seconds, so tense that she was practically vibrating with anxiety, and then zipped up the gun and walked out of the room. The door slammed shut. With a sigh, I leaned back and flopped onto the bed. I covered my eyes with my arm and, deciding there was nothing better to do than sleep, I did.

 

I heard her come back but I pretended to still be asleep. Watching her out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that she was still angry. I had no idea if it was at me or herself. Possibly both.

I rolled over, exposing my back to the danger of the psycho-bitch assassin in the room in a way that I hoped communicated how not-worried I was about the possibility that she was going to kill me.

She unzipped her bag angrily and stalked off to our room’s tiny bathroom to be away from me again. The sound of water lulled me back to sleep.


	6. Part V:  End of the Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a new city brings new challenges and an understanding is reached.

The first day in Chicago was spent by evading pursuers. Riding different subway and elevated tracks delighted us to no end, despite Oda’s extreme paranoia. The ‘L’ was not so different from the tube. The scent of urine was apparently a defining characteristic of the type of transport no matter the side of the Atlantic.

Oda threatened us with bodily harm when we stood gazing down at the murky grey-green of the Chicago River on the Jackson Bridge. It amazed us that the river could be so wonderfully disgusting while Lake Michigan could be such a bright topaz blue.

We took the elevated Brown Line track around the loop of the downtown area. Despite the different jaded yet energetic quality of the magic of the city, I found myself finely aligned with it. I breathed the screech of brakes on the tracks that wound around and around above the street and the irritation of the morning rush. The mixture of glass, steel, and brick surroundings towering overhead, the scent of the coffee of the commute, the packed train car, and all of the rest intoxicated us to the point where we were as jittery as if we’d injected caffeine directly into our system.

Oda eyed us with some amusement, as we gazed out with wide eyes. She sat across from us on the Brown Line and pressed in close when we transferred to the Red Line belowground on State and Jackson. The people were packed so tightly that I could hear the pounding bass coming from the headphones of a kid in a hoodie that nearly caused me to jump out of my skin.

At the Chinatown stop on the Red Line, I watched a man board the train whose skin was so dirty that it was impossible to determine the natural colour.

The train had emptied somewhat and he stood next to us, smelling strongly of the garbage in his cloth bag, old socks, and sewer. I smiled. He gave me a smile back with several teeth missing. Some of them were replaced with gold fillings, but most were just rotting fissures.

Eyes like black holes, filled with promises of knives in a dark alley, a stranger following in the dark, and gang signs on your garage door, he grunted, “You’ve come a long way, kid. Ain’t seen nobody like you ‘round here.”

“There are other sorcerers in Chicago,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” he said, and the eyes flashed briefly towards the shut train doors, as if he needed to make sure there was an escape in a fight. “But they almost normal in ‘parison.”

“Where could we find a sorceress named Quincy?”

“You be going in the wrong direh-shun,” he sighed. He pointed up at the map of the Red Line hanging above the train doors. “She’s where she named.”

I nodded. “I figured, but we were there on the Brown Line and she wasn’t.”

“Then, maybe she visiting. Used to go to the Underground City, but things got bad with Washington.”

I thought about this for a moment, mulling over terms until I realized he meant the mostly underground tunnels of Chicago. “The Pedway, you mean?” I asked.

“What else’s the Underground City?”

“Forget I asked. Well, where does she spend time now then?”

“Formed a pact with Fullerton after Washington.”

I eyed the map and nodded.

At the next stop, we got off, although Oda protested minimally, and got on a train going back the way we had just come.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Who was that?”

“There is always an area of a city with a bad connotation,” I said conversationally. “A place where the suburban kids never go because their parents warn them of the dangers of the city, where the rebels run away to and learn everything the hard way. That was the South Side Master.”

“What? A representation of the South Side of Chicago?”

“You’ve got it.”

“And where are we going?”

“To visit Quincy.”

“Where?”

I pointed up at the map of the entire ‘L’ above the door and showed her the stop on the Brown, Purple, Pink, and Orange Lines labelled Quincy. “Well, she’s apparently not at Quincy, or she wasn’t when we were on the Brown Line this morning. Quincy apparently doesn’t take the Pedway anymore because of some sort of gang war between her and Washington.” I indicated the spot on the Blue Line labelled Washington. “And now she’s… living with Fullerton. I’d say that’s our best bet.” Towards the northern end of the map of the whole ‘L,’ there was a station called Fullerton. It made perfect sense that Fullerton was also a transfer stop for the Brown and Purple Lines that Quincy lived on.

“And who are these… people? Sorcerers?”

“Yes, and bloody unoriginal ones at that. They initiate into little gang factions and name themselves after stations. Can you imagine that with the names on the tube? We’d have Brixton and Angel; Canada Water and Oxford Circus! Penny would probably want to be called Cockfosters.”

“Is Quincy’s real name something unoriginal?”

“I believe it’s Cheryl,” I said and smiled.

“Then I think Quincy is infinitely more practical for her purposes.”

“You would.”

 

It was late in the afternoon after a long morning of train-hopping when we reached the Fullerton stop in Lincoln Park. Lincoln Park was a bustling centre of college students wearing hoodies, sweatpants, and jeans. Multicoloured backpacks slung over their shoulders and mobiles in their hands as they waited for the next train. Variations in dress and age included a few girls in brown or black boots and skirts, a man with long black hair and silver chains hanging from his waist and wrists, a little girl with braids and flower-patterned tights, and an old man in a brown jumper muttering to himself. Oda watched for weapon-shaped bulges in people’s clothing while I looked for a likely spot for sorcerers to congregate.

The Red Line was over the street, rather than underground, at this stop, so I could stare out at the apartment buildings, McDonald’s, college buildings, and Starbucks. Everything was brick and weathered. Leaves were blowing around in the street, a couple was giving away free samples of some energy drink to people entering and leaving the station, and a woman was timidly trying to get people to take flyers from her.

I didn’t need to find out where the sorcerers were. Even after ten years, I spotted Quincy almost instantly. We dashed down the platform stairs, heard Oda’s light-footed run behind us, and arrived at street-level. Dodging people coming towards us, we pushed through the turnstiles and paused out at the street under the overhead track of the train.

Her hair was pixie short and purple and she was wearing a tattered black skirt with thigh-high boots and big hoop earrings, but she was recognizable. The best comparison would probably be that she looked like a 1990s American classic program’s title character. By which, I mean, she looked like Xena, warrior princess. Aside from the attire and hair, she looked exactly the same. Like an Amazon. Huge and powerful and tall.

“Quincy!” I shouted as she started walking towards the combination Starbucks and grocery store on the corner.

She turned back and stared at me for a long moment with very dark eyes. Then, she grinned. It transformed her face to something no less dangerous than a warrior princess, but it was strangely cheerful. “Swift,” she mouthed. Quincy knew better than to shout out someone’s name. As far as I’d gathered, this was her territory or at least her friend’s territory so she had no fear of attack. She had no such assurances about me and I was glad she’d thought of it.

As she walked back under the bridge, I got a good look at how tall she was. “Death didn’t give you a hand in the height department,” she said.

“You heard about that over here?”

“’Course. You’re practically a legend, especially to the Pigeon Brains,” she said.

From behind me, Oda said, low and annoyed, “Can we have this conversation somewhere else?”

Quincy’s razor thin eyebrows rose. “No one’s gonna shit with me or mine in this area,” she said.

“I don’t particularly care what you or your godforsaken people do, but this is an open area,” said Oda. I winced. “We will move.”

“What Oda means to say,” I said quickly when I saw Quincy’s hand twitch, “is that a lot of unpleasant people want us dead and are more than likely offering a lot of money for it. Even people that wouldn’t normally cross you.”

Quincy stared at Oda for a heartbeat too long and then looked me up and down. It was appraising and wolf-like and I suddenly felt like a slab of meat. “Fair enough,” she said. “Follow me.”

“Where are we going?” I asked when Oda looked no less annoyed.

“Fully has an apartment a block from here.”

Quincy didn’t supply any more information and we didn’t ask for any. We could only tell by the glances she snuck at Oda that she was very curious about our companion. Oda, of course, ignored her and eyed each passerby on the pavement, while keeping her hands in her pockets.

Down the street and around an open metal gate and down a wide cobbled lane to a circle of townhouses. All of them were brick with black shutters and black fences but they had individual charm. One had a corner garden of brightly coloured flowers that we couldn’t name, while another had a wooden duck on the front steps. The one where Fully apparently lived had a stained-glass window on the door and a crystal wind chime hanging in a tree near a window.

Quincy pulled out a key and let us into a house that said Sorcerers Live Here as much as my old place had, by which I mean not at all. It was a little disappointing. There was hardwood floor leading down a dark hallway and off to a carpeted sitting room with flowery couches.

“This used to be his mother’s place,” Quincy explained. “Wait here.”

I gratefully sat on a squishy flowery armchair, while Oda pretended not to be surprised by the décor by looking at the lit china cabinet filled with porcelain figurines of dancers.

It was less than two minutes before Quincy returned with a tall man somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five who could only be described as geeky. Clothed in a black t-shirt with some sort of video game logo on the front and baggy jeans, his wire-framed glasses were perched at the tip of a long nose. They shielded a pair of eyes with obvious teal coloured contacts.

It took a moment for me to recognize him, especially when he had a fiery red ponytail but black hair on his head. “Andy?” I asked.

“It’s Fully now, actually,” he said but he was smiling. “I’ve gone up in the world in the last decade, like yourself.”

“I’ve had my ups and downs,” I admitted. “You’re head of the Reds now?”

“’Course. ’Couldn’t leave Gary in charge.”

I didn’t ask about the change in power. It wasn’t really a thing one would want to know.

 

There were important questions to be answered. Such as whether either of them knew anything about the Order in Chicago. The Answer: Of course, they did. The Order was always muddling in their affairs. Getting involved in wars between the Lines, trying to get one to double-cross another one, drive by shootings, raids, that sort of thing.

“Do you have an idea of the number of members?” Oda asked. It was the first thing she had said since we had entered the house and both Fully and Quincy looked at her, at me, at her, and then at each other before answering.

“The best guess is ten,” Fully said, “but we generally only deal with two members, the public faces and the ones who perform the orders. The others are mostly gunmen, holy men, or both.”

We talked strategy until Fully complained of hunger and went to go heat up four TV dinners. Quincy pulled me aside and yet spoke loudly enough for Oda to hear. “Who is this woman?” she demanded.

“I won’t lie to you,” I said. “She’s part of the Order, whether past or present, it doesn’t matter. They’re still a presence in our lives.”

Quincy loomed over me and said, “You let me bring her here.”

“I trust her.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not so sure you’re thinking with your brain.”

We gave her a level, unblinking stare, daring her to imply anything. She didn’t; she stopped looming.

With a shrug, she dismissed the entire argument. “Fine,” she said. “It’s not like the Order is generally something we worry about here. Truth be told, the ones in charge right now have been bought off by the cops who don’t want the trouble on the streets. They have enough problems with regulars without magicians.”

I could practically feel Oda frowning behind me.

“They’ll go after Oda and me,” I said. “There’s no question. She knows everything about them and I’m Public Enemy Number One.”

Oda coughed. It sounded suspiciously like “Number Two.”

Quincy didn’t hear. “Bad _ass_ ,” she said and smirked. “I think I have an idea on how to get them to let up though.”

“Do tell.”

 

That night, we were sitting on the front steps trying to steal magic from the tall iron lights along the street. It hurt. In fact, everything hurt. Apparently, using lightning overloaded something in my body. Stealing electricity should have been as easy as blinking and yet it was giving me a migraine just for the attempt.

The ball of light I finally managed to gather up sparked and shocked my hand. I swore and released it, causing the street light that I had stolen from to light up so fast that the bulb burst and rained glass down onto the car below it.

“Always with the property damage,” Oda said from the doorway behind me.

“It’s a skill. I have to continually practice it or I’ll lose it.”

She sat down beside me, leaving a gap well over a foot between us.

I took a deep breath and said, “I think maybe I’ve been overstressed. Perhaps wrecked some boundaries?”

“The boundaries have not changed.”

“Right,” I said and paused. I decided to try something else. “When this is over, maybe, what are you doing with your life, Oda? Assassin, works well with guns or any heavy weaponry, is going to look great on a résumé.”

“Just as well as Sorcerer, works well with electricity and telephones, abroad for two years, good at demolition work, some managerial experience.”

I stared at her for so long that she looked away and then laughter overflowed out of me where I had thought that there was only hopelessness. It felt amazing. For just a moment, I didn’t feel the physical pain or the worry.

She waited for me to stop before she spoke again. “Why did you come with me, Matthew?”

I sobered immediately. “We were being chased by the Order and your undead brother.”

“Not ‘we.’ You could have stayed, stayed with your city, and he would have followed me.”

“No offense and all, but he would have killed you. London, Atlanta, Chicago, wherever. He would have killed you.”

“I am a magician-killer. I have been doing it ever since I killed my brother the first time, and I could do the same to you. I don’t need your help nor your pity and – ”

“Pity?” I repeated. Hot, blue, burning anger made me clench my fists. “Oda, he murdered my grandmother and bathed himself in her blood! Don’t think for one moment that I could have run away from that.”

“And yet you said yourself that at no point did you have to help me in this.”

I stopped. We stopped. Thoughts trickled through.

“What if he hadn’t followed us right away and stayed and killed? You wouldn’t have been in your precious city, Mr Mayor, to stop him from murdering Penny or the next random citizen.”

“The Aldermen were – ”

She laughed cruelly. “The Aldermen would not have saved your apprentice if she were attacked in front of their building, let alone sent people out to protect her.”

I licked my dry lips and tried to explain. “There is no one better protected than Penny,” I whispered.

“How?”

We closed our eyes. “The London Underground symbol on her door and stitched into or written on every article of clothing she owns in some capacity, the twin crosses on the other side of her door, water from the Thames in a jar by her front door and on the shelf beneath her bedroom window, red glass from a street light, and other protection that we cannot tell anyone.”

“Because you won’t let her be another Dana.”

We opened our eyes and met her gaze without blinking. “No, we won’t.”

She nodded and remained silent for a long time. It was strangely comfortable, maybe because she wasn’t being disapproving. I tried doing more magic, stealing light, using the eyes of rats and birds, but it was difficult when I tried to do more than just experience the magic. Emotions, flow of the city, life, light, fire. We could feel all that, just like on the train that morning, but we couldn’t use the power.

Oda watched us. “You need to sleep,” she said when we almost kicked something in frustration.

“I’ve been doing that.”

“Not really. You’re not very good at pretending, and, when you do sleep, you dream.”

“Hmm” is all I said, although I did go up to bed a few minutes later. We slept better than we had in a few days, but mostly I think it was out of sheer exhaustion.

 

It was a Wednesday afternoon along the lake. With our back to the water, we could see Buckingham Fountain across Lake Shore Drive, flinging great dollops of water into the air with that day’s high winds. If you swivelled to the left, you could see a great big fish tank, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum along the lakefront. If instead you went right, there was Navy Pier off in the distance sticking out into the water with a great big Ferris wheel and cruise ships. We were standing on a pathway along the lake so people were biking and walking and skating by. You could tell the difference between those that were just taking a break from the office to take a deep breath and the tourists gawking.

In the grand scheme of things involving the lake, we were perfectly centrally located and we liked it that way. It was the sort of thing most urban sorcerers could appreciate. It was touristy and loud and fast-paced and so very urban that we could taste it on our tongue just as easily as we could smell the lake water. I knew that I could do magic here.

Oda didn’t appreciate the setting. In fact, she looked annoyed. While the tall buildings were far enough back where we didn’t have to look for gunmen in the windows, the boats beside us and the hustle and bustle could hide pretty much anything. Her eyes did not pause for even a moment.

“So,” Quincy was saying loud enough that Oda could hear her again, while we waited for an audience with the Chicago Order members “If this woman is Order stuff, what is she doing with you? You didn’t really explain.”

She was… fishing for information. I understood the curiosity; I didn’t have to welcome it though. “It’s a very long story involving damnation, death threats, and destruction,” I said. “I’d rather not go into it.”

“So no magic tricks up her sleeve?”

I couldn’t quite stop a chuckle. “No, just knives,” I said. “But I’m sure she’s learned a thing or two about the magic of a fare card and beer bottles,” I said, glancing at Oda.

She didn’t stop her surveillance of the area, but she did say, “As opposed to magic, bullets are much more effective.”

“Cheery thought.”

Quincy stared. Fully pretended not to by watching a goose honk at a bicyclist.

A motorboat manoeuvred through all of the other boats floating along the retaining wall. Gang leaders Quincy and Fully somehow took thirty seconds to notice this, but I heard the sound of the motor and Oda’s head snapped in the boat’s direction.

It wasn’t immediately obvious that the two guys in the boat were Order members. I mean, the crosses around their necks and the guns so obviously tucked inside their jackets were a big clue, but what really did it for me was the fact that fucking Chaigneau was staring up at me.

They climbed out of the boat and used the ladder along the wall to reach the sidewalk. Chaigneau nodded to Quincy and Fully and then gazed down his nose at Oda. “I prayed this moment would come,” he said.

“Fancy that,” I said and gave him a smile that was all teeth when he shifted his gaze to me.

“Swift, it just hasn’t been long enough. I had hoped to be identifying your filthy remains by now.”

“You can’t always get what you want.”

He made a noise that was half-annoyed and half-condescending. “Your Aldermen tried to explain to me that if the Order continued to hunt you that they would curse us,” he explained. “However, I have survived curses before and come out the stronger for it. I declined any offers of negotiation after your little escapade in Savannah.”

“You survived the curse from our blood because we let you live,” we said. “And you should be thanking us for stopping that monster witch doctor that you unleashed.”

“The Chicago Order had reports of problems on your bus downstate,” he said. “Thank you, monster, for ridding the world of another monster, as usual.” He bowed mockingly.

“I would think that would lesson my monster status.”

“No, it just makes you think more of your blasphemous power. God continues to test you to see if you have repented your arrogant ways and yet you continue to fail.”

“So if I had let the witch doctor kill me, that would have been a success in God’s eyes?”

Chaigneau ignored the question. “The crux of the matter is justice.”

“Of course.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Quincy edging towards me. Just as suddenly, Oda was pressed against the other woman’s back with her gun digging into Quincy’s spine through the folds of Oda’s coat in broad daylight.

“She was about to betray us,” Oda said loudly enough for everyone to hear, including Quincy.

“Yup,” I said. “It sort of makes sense. We’ve got this ‘Us versus the World’ thing going on right now.”

A tiny smile twisted her lips. “And of course no one as easy to sneak up on could be a leader of a powerful gang like the Browns if she wasn’t making deals with the Order to help them bring down the other Lines.”

“She’s what?” Fully demanded, stepping towards Oda and his girlfriend.

“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” I pointed out.

“While this is all very nice,” Chaigneau said, “I really don’t care if this sorceress gets shot.”

“And that is why you really irritate me, Chaigneau,” I said. While his attention was on me for three seconds, Oda shoved Quincy into Chaigneau and the other Order member. They all went down, leaving Fully standing around in complete confusion.

Oda and I were dozens of yards away before bullets starting flying as the sun set, but there was also the easily recognizable call of a police siren over the steady noise of the city. A well-placed phone call from a payphone along the way not ten minutes before, while pretending to call Penny, would save a lot of innocent bystanders. The shots stopped as the police showed up.

I hadn’t counted on Quincy becoming an angry Amazon and outrunning both of us.

It was like getting hit in the back by a sack of coal. I went down, biting my lips so hard that I could taste the coppery blood on my tongue, and banged my forehead against the concrete. There were people screaming, running away from the edge of the water and towards Lake Shore Drive.

Oda skidded to a halt and aimed her gun at Quincy’s head. “Get off of him,” she said. There was no implication of a please.

“Why? Are you mad that I sold him out before you could?”

“What?” I grunted, trying to throw her off.

“You’re valuable, Matthew,” Quincy sighed. “Even more valuable than my leader status. This deal with the Order means I don’t even have to be the Browns’ leader anymore. I could retire to the suburbs. Fully too. We’d live like royalty with what you’re worth. Now that the deal with the Order has fallen through thanks to you, I could easily sell you on eBay. Drain your blood… Take your hair and eyes.”

“Thanks for the motivational speech. I feel really worthwhile now. However, I don’t think Fully is too happy with you right now.”

“He knows what we have to do to stay on top.”

“I said get off of him,” Oda said.

“How about this?” Quincy suggested. “I’ll take his hair and eyes and blood and you can take his body back to England to prove that you offed him. That way the Order welcomes you back.”

Oda gave a very long, tired sigh and shot Quincy in the arm.

That was when things got really interesting. Quincy jolted off of me, swearing and clutching her arm, I got bled on, Oda pocketed her gun and grabbed my hands to pull me up, the police decided that we should also be apprehended with Chaigneau, the Order member, and Fully, and, not really wanting to explain what the hell was going on, Oda and I jumped in Lake Michigan.

I know. Not exactly safe, or even remotely advisable, but that’s what we did.

The police probably didn’t know what to think. Shots fired. People drowning. What the hell?

Sorry for ruining your day, Chicago Police Department. I bet the report probably said something like “random gang violence.”

 

The water was unpleasantly cold and the only reason that we escaped was that we hid among the boats while a lot of shouting went on and then we dragged ourselves up onto a small yacht. Oda took out her wet gun and set it on the dashboard, while I entreated the engine to start. It purred and we were off.

 

About a hundred miles later, we ditched the boat somewhere on the other side of the lake. The boat had sandwich makings and beer on board, which meant that we were well-fed, but we smelled like lake water and that had to be rectified.

Oda wouldn’t let us go to the first hotel that we saw. Or the next one after that either. “We’re probably wanted for attempted murder,” she said. “You can’t just drip into a nice hotel.”

“We?” I grunted. “I’m not the one with the gun.”

She ignored this bit of crankiness instead of threatening my life, which was rather nice of her.

Finally, she deemed us acceptably free of followers and of the chance of getting caught and brought us to one of the dingier establishments we had ever seen.

“I’ll pass,” I said. She ignored me and jabbed me in the back to move us forward.

 

In the morning, we went to another internet café. My inbox consisted of several messages from pennythesorceress@gmail.co.uk:

Matthew, I swear that you had better e-mail me soon.  
\- Penny

Seriously. You’re being about as forthcoming with info as the Aldermen. Where the fuck are you?

And more of the same. There was also:

From: trkemsley@harlunandphelps.com

Mr Mayor –  
I feel it necessary to inform you that the Aldermen will not be funding your current venture.  
Have a pleasant holiday.

Bastard.

I e-mailed Penny:

Sorceress –  
Stop worrying. I’m still alive.  
\- Sorcerer

Oda’s e-mails made her smile in a way that made me a little nervous. “Chaigneau has returned to London,” she said. “An incident with the Chicago Police Department was a little too public for the Order.”

I smiled too.

 

It became a little of a road trip. An unspoken road trip at that. We didn’t discuss why we didn’t go straight back to London. In fact, the only thing we talked about was where we were going next. Sometimes, we met sorcerers I hadn’t seen in years. Thankfully, none of them tried to sell us out to live comfortably in the suburbs or try to harvest my organs. Sometimes, the Order did find us, but they soon learned that it was better if you just left us alone.

I accidentally got captured and had to burn a church down. Oda was so angry at me that she didn’t speak to me for three days. When she finally did, it was to say, “I could kill you.”

“But you won’t,” I replied.

And, as usual, she looked a little annoyed that I sounded so sure of the fact.

 

And then one day:

The metallic click of Oda’s gun on the nightstand jolted me out of a perfectly decent slumber.

It did not even remotely surprise us that she jogged with a gun somewhere on her person. What intrigued me was where she hid it.

Safe in a cocoon of formerly white hotel sheets, I took one bleary look at her, took in the running shorts and the slight sheen of sweat along her collarbone, and buried my face in a formless pillow.

There was something strange about her facial expression. It both amazed and nauseated me.

I heard her down the rest of her water bottle and waited. Maybe I would fall back asleep before…

“Why don’t you expect me to kill you as I promised?” she asked.

I cursed into the pillow.

“What?”

It was with great reluctance that I actually lifted my head to face her. “Because wearing a bulletproof vest all the time would be tedious,” I said.

She rolled her eyes and started to turn away, but I latched onto her wrist and nearly tumbled out of bed when she continued moving for longer than I expected. “You really spent your morning jog thinking about our relationship?” I asked, as I grabbed the nightstand with my other hand to save myself. “I’m touched.”

Oda glared at the hand attached to hers. “Everything does not revolve around you, sorcerer.”

“That question certainly pertains to me,” I said.

“Then what is the answer?”

There was no hesitation in my response; it was strange and wonderful and felt as easy as breathing. “I love you,” I said.

“And what about them?”

“We are – ”

“Do not say ‘we are me and I am we’ or I will shoot you.”

“With all our being,” we said. “We cannot not love you, even though you may hate everything that we represent. Do you love us?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” she said in a way that was almost resigned, “despite your blasphemy, your Satanic ways, your conceited existence, yes. Somehow, Matthew.”

It was strange how giddy and ridiculously happy one can feel while on the run from assassins with a woman who is commonly referred to as the “psycho-bitch” and had frequently informed me since the day that we met that she was going to kill me.

As if she read my thoughts, she smiled fondly down at me and bent to kiss my forehead.


	7. Epilogue:  Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything is just a point of view.

Oda found us one morning with our socks off and our feet dangling over a wooden bridge and into a stream. It was in the Middle of Nowhere in a place between one part of Civilization and the next.

Before, I would have hated it. No main or gas lines. Not even the rumble of a distant car hobbling over the dirt road. There was simply nothing for miles. Except. The water was cool on our toes and the stones at the bottom of the shallow stream were smooth and vaguely brown and dark grey. In comparison to the city, there was almost complete silence. The rustle of leaves and birds chirping and creatures burrowing and water dribbling was almost unnoticeable.

And we could actually sense some of the power of that constant, steady flow and how timeless it would be if we gave into impulse and reached down to take up a stone and skip it across the water in the deeper parts to the west.

We are willing to try almost anything. At least once.

With a little effort and a crease between our eyes, we willed a tiny swirl of water to skim off the top of the brook and curl in the air. It was harder than manipulating water coming out of a tap or running grimily through the sewers. This was, as far as standards went today, relatively untouched and so we could barely grab hold of it without pollutants to influence.

“You must be getting bored,” Oda said behind us.

Hands wrapped around the lower beams of the railing on the bridge, we leaned back with our feet still dipped in the water and grinned at her standing above us in her workout clothes. While she had been off in the trees beyond our camp doing her usual morning training, I had slipped off to alleviate an itch burning at the back of my brain.

“It’s just another challenge,” we said. “A point of view.” I kept the rest unsaid. The itch scorched my tongue.

“You want to go home,” said Oda.

“I’m the Midnight Mayor of London,” I said gloomily. “I feel very irresponsible.”

“London doesn’t revolve around you.”

“My apprentice needs me. The last time I left one alone shit happened.”

“Yes.”

We laughed at her exasperated expression. There was a part of us that was amazed every time she responded in some way that wasn’t disgust or loathing or just plain indifference.

“I win at understatements,” I said gleefully.

Oda rolled her eyes and held out her hand. I took it, feeling the calluses rough against my skin, seeing how pale my hand was in comparison, but how both of us were scarred and burnt in a pattern on our fingers, and helped her pull me up. She met my eyes squarely and then turned to walk back to our camp.

We would run into the Order in London. We would run into the Order probably anywhere eventually. But London was home and we were Midnight Mayor and blue electric angels and sorcerer and me and she was Oda and psycho-bitch. There wasn’t much we couldn’t achieve as far as I was concerned.

I didn’t let go and neither did she.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **The end. And just in time for this story to become AU with the release of book 3, The Neon Court. Ha. However, it has only been released in the UK so far, and, as I live in the US, I won't be getting it until the end of March. Therefore, please don't tell me about it until then. After that, let's chat?**
> 
>  **In the meantime, please tell me what you thought of this fanfic. Thanks for reading.**


End file.
